ExxonMobil and Sierra Club Agreed on Climate Policy—and Kept It Secret
Source: Bloomberg
A forgotten accord reached in 2009 may yet have relevance for the future of U.S. climate policy.
ExxonMobil and Sierra Club may be thought of as natural enemies, particularly when it comes to a question so tricky as how to address climate change. That's what two men named David thought, too, when they first met in 2008 to talk about a climate policy with very little support: a national tax on industrial carbon dioxide emissions. Secretly, however, they found that a common problem—the threat of unwieldy legislation—can for a time scramble the very idea of friends and enemies.
“Demonizing people is not a good idea,” said David Bailey, who at the time managed climate policy for ExxonMobil in Washington. “I realized that people at the Sierra Club don’t all have horns and a tail, and—I think—likewise.”
His negotiating partner at the time, David Bookbinder, was the chief climate counsel for the Sierra Club. The two wonks, working for organizations that are typically locked in opposition, recognized a shared interest in finding an alternative direction for U.S. climate policy. It took nearly a year and more than a dozen meetings to come up with a short document that bridged a huge chasm. It turns out that America's biggest oil company and one of its most iconic environmental groups could collaborate. What they came up with has gone unacknowledged until now—and it could provide a path past an intractable impasse on climate policy.
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The document—available here (PDF)—consists of 10 ideas that might shape a national carbon tax. A bill should set the U.S. on an emissions path that takes into account global climate-change risk and establishes an independent body to adjust the tax, when appropriate. Legislators should refund 90 percent of the tax to Americans, with the rest marked for research, technology deployment, and relief for coal communities.
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Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-22/exxonmobil-and-sierra-club-agreed-on-climate-policy-and-kept-it-secret
This reminds me of how Stanford Professor Martin Hellman described his first meeting with NSA chief Admiral Bobby Ray Inman:
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I had the privilege of experiencing this approach first hand in the 1970’s. Back then, NSA was used to having absolute control over all American cryptographic research, so they were rankled when I started publishing papers that they would have classified above Top Secret. I had developed my results without access to the classified literature, so I thought I should be free to publish my work – plus, there was a growing personal and commercial need for encryption that could not be met by classified algorithms. NSA saw things differently, and some elements within the Agency warned that I could be thrown in jail for publishing my work. This confrontation drew major media coverage, including coverage in Science, TIME magazine, and the New York Times.
That battle was in full swing when Inman took over as Director of NSA and, against the advice of all his advisors at the Agency, decided to pay me a visit to see if he could defuse the conflict. I’ll never forget his cutting through the initial tension by telling me, “It’s nice to see you don’t have horns,” which is how the career people at NSA had been portraying me. I repaid the compliment, since their threats had produced a similar picture of NSA in my mind. Inman went on to tell me that he couldn’t see the harm in talking, and talk we did. With that kind of “out of the box” thinking on Inman’s part, what had been an adversarial relationship eventually blossomed into a friendship with enough trust and understanding that Inman is one of the charter signers of my petition asking Congress to authorize a study of the risk inherent in our current nuclear posture.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
