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Richard Berman Energy Industry Talk Secretly Taped
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/31/us/politics/pr-executives-western-energy-alliance-speech-taped.html?
"WASHINGTON — If the oil and gas industry wants to prevent its opponents from slowing its efforts to drill in more places, it must be prepared to employ tactics like digging up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities, a veteran Washington political consultant told a room full of industry executives in a speech that was secretly recorded.
The blunt advice from the consultant, Richard Berman, the founder and chief executive of the Washington-based Berman & Company consulting firm, came as Mr. Berman solicited up to $3 million from oil and gas industry executives to finance an advertising and public relations campaign called Big Green Radicals.
The company executives, Mr. Berman said in his speech, must be willing to exploit emotions like fear, greed and anger and turn them against the environmental groups. And major corporations secretly financing such a campaign should not worry about offending the general public because “you can either win ugly or lose pretty,” he said.
“Think of this as an endless war,” Mr. Berman told the crowd at the June event in Colorado Springs, sponsored by the Western Energy Alliance, a group whose members include Devon Energy, Halliburton and Anadarko Petroleum, which specialize in extracting oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. “And you have to budget for it.”
What Mr. Berman did not know — and what could now complicate his task of marginalizing environmental groups that want to impose limits on fracking — is that one of the energy industry executives recorded his remarks and was offended by them.
“That you have to play dirty to win,” said the executive, who provided a copy of the recording and the meeting agenda to The New York Times under the condition that his identity not be revealed. “It just left a bad taste in my mouth.”
Mr. Berman had flown to Colorado with Jack Hubbard, a vice president at Berman & Company, to discuss their newest public relations campaign, Big Green Radicals, which has already placed a series of intentionally controversial advertisements in Pennsylvania and Colorado, two states where the debate over fracking has been intense. It has also paid to place the media campaign on websites serving national and Washington audiences.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Berman confirmed that he gave the speech, but said he would have no comment on its contents.
Mr. Berman is well known in Washington for his technique of creating nonprofit groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom that secretly collect corporate donations to finance the aggressive, often satirical media campaigns his team conceives. They are intended to undermine his opponents, like labor unions or animal rights groups that have tried to spotlight the treatment of animals at meatpacking plants.
“I get up every morning and I try to figure out how to screw with the labor unions — that’s my offense,” Mr. Berman said in his speech to the Western Energy Alliance. “I am just trying to figure out how I am going to reduce their brand."
Mr. Berman offered several pointers from his playbook.
“If you want a video to go viral, have kids or animals,” he said, and then he showed a spot his company had prepared using schoolchildren as participants in a mock union election — to suggest that union bosses do not have real elections.
“Use humor to minimize or marginalize the people on the other side,” he added.
“There is nothing the public likes more than tearing down celebrities and playing up the hypocrisy angle,” his colleague Mr. Hubbard said, citing billboard advertisements planned for Pennsylvania that featured Robert Redford. “Demands green living,” they read. “Flies on private jets.”
Mr. Hubbard also discussed how he had done detailed research on the personal histories of members of the boards of the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council to try to find information that could be used to embarrass them.
But the speech, given in June at the Broadmoor Hotel and Resort, where the Western Energy Alliance held its 2014 annual meeting, could end up bringing a new round of scrutiny to Mr. Berman and the vast network of nonprofit groups and think tanks he runs out of his downtown Washington office.
Mr. Berman repeatedly boasted about how he could take checks from the oil and gas industry executives — he said he had already collected six-figure contributions from some of the executives in the room — and then hide their role in funding his campaigns.
“People always ask me one question all the time: ‘How do I know that I won’t be found out as a supporter of what you’re doing?’ " Mr. Berman told the crowd. “We run all of this stuff through nonprofit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors. There is total anonymity. People don’t know who supports us.”
What is unclear is if the hardball tactics that Mr. Berman has pitched will succeed in places like Colorado. Already, The Denver Post editorial page, generally supportive of the oil and gas industry, has criticized Mr. Berman’s tactics, calling one video spot — featuring fictitious environmentalists who debate if the moon is made of cheese before calling for a ban on fracking — “a cheap shot at fracking foes.”
But Mr. Berman probably appreciated the criticism. As he explained in his remarks, what matters is increasing the number of people who see his work, which is part of the reason he intentionally tries to offend people in his media campaigns.
“They characterize us in a campaign as being the guys with the black helicopters,” he explained. “And to some degree, that’s true. We’re doing stuff to diminish the other sides’ ability to operate.”
"WASHINGTON — If the oil and gas industry wants to prevent its opponents from slowing its efforts to drill in more places, it must be prepared to employ tactics like digging up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities, a veteran Washington political consultant told a room full of industry executives in a speech that was secretly recorded.
The blunt advice from the consultant, Richard Berman, the founder and chief executive of the Washington-based Berman & Company consulting firm, came as Mr. Berman solicited up to $3 million from oil and gas industry executives to finance an advertising and public relations campaign called Big Green Radicals.
The company executives, Mr. Berman said in his speech, must be willing to exploit emotions like fear, greed and anger and turn them against the environmental groups. And major corporations secretly financing such a campaign should not worry about offending the general public because “you can either win ugly or lose pretty,” he said.
“Think of this as an endless war,” Mr. Berman told the crowd at the June event in Colorado Springs, sponsored by the Western Energy Alliance, a group whose members include Devon Energy, Halliburton and Anadarko Petroleum, which specialize in extracting oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. “And you have to budget for it.”
What Mr. Berman did not know — and what could now complicate his task of marginalizing environmental groups that want to impose limits on fracking — is that one of the energy industry executives recorded his remarks and was offended by them.
“That you have to play dirty to win,” said the executive, who provided a copy of the recording and the meeting agenda to The New York Times under the condition that his identity not be revealed. “It just left a bad taste in my mouth.”
Mr. Berman had flown to Colorado with Jack Hubbard, a vice president at Berman & Company, to discuss their newest public relations campaign, Big Green Radicals, which has already placed a series of intentionally controversial advertisements in Pennsylvania and Colorado, two states where the debate over fracking has been intense. It has also paid to place the media campaign on websites serving national and Washington audiences.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Berman confirmed that he gave the speech, but said he would have no comment on its contents.
Mr. Berman is well known in Washington for his technique of creating nonprofit groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom that secretly collect corporate donations to finance the aggressive, often satirical media campaigns his team conceives. They are intended to undermine his opponents, like labor unions or animal rights groups that have tried to spotlight the treatment of animals at meatpacking plants.
“I get up every morning and I try to figure out how to screw with the labor unions — that’s my offense,” Mr. Berman said in his speech to the Western Energy Alliance. “I am just trying to figure out how I am going to reduce their brand."
Mr. Berman offered several pointers from his playbook.
“If you want a video to go viral, have kids or animals,” he said, and then he showed a spot his company had prepared using schoolchildren as participants in a mock union election — to suggest that union bosses do not have real elections.
“Use humor to minimize or marginalize the people on the other side,” he added.
“There is nothing the public likes more than tearing down celebrities and playing up the hypocrisy angle,” his colleague Mr. Hubbard said, citing billboard advertisements planned for Pennsylvania that featured Robert Redford. “Demands green living,” they read. “Flies on private jets.”
Mr. Hubbard also discussed how he had done detailed research on the personal histories of members of the boards of the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council to try to find information that could be used to embarrass them.
But the speech, given in June at the Broadmoor Hotel and Resort, where the Western Energy Alliance held its 2014 annual meeting, could end up bringing a new round of scrutiny to Mr. Berman and the vast network of nonprofit groups and think tanks he runs out of his downtown Washington office.
Mr. Berman repeatedly boasted about how he could take checks from the oil and gas industry executives — he said he had already collected six-figure contributions from some of the executives in the room — and then hide their role in funding his campaigns.
“People always ask me one question all the time: ‘How do I know that I won’t be found out as a supporter of what you’re doing?’ " Mr. Berman told the crowd. “We run all of this stuff through nonprofit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors. There is total anonymity. People don’t know who supports us.”
What is unclear is if the hardball tactics that Mr. Berman has pitched will succeed in places like Colorado. Already, The Denver Post editorial page, generally supportive of the oil and gas industry, has criticized Mr. Berman’s tactics, calling one video spot — featuring fictitious environmentalists who debate if the moon is made of cheese before calling for a ban on fracking — “a cheap shot at fracking foes.”
But Mr. Berman probably appreciated the criticism. As he explained in his remarks, what matters is increasing the number of people who see his work, which is part of the reason he intentionally tries to offend people in his media campaigns.
“They characterize us in a campaign as being the guys with the black helicopters,” he explained. “And to some degree, that’s true. We’re doing stuff to diminish the other sides’ ability to operate.”
".....together, oil companies including Chevron Corp. and Occidental Petroleum have spent $7.7 million to defeat them. That’s more money than California’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, Neel Kashkari, has raised during his entire campaign......"
Somewhere, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin are mourning and Lincoln shakes his head as we voluntarily put on our chains.
Somewhere, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin are mourning and Lincoln shakes his head as we voluntarily put on our chains.
RIP Democracy. Welcome to the new Soviet style oligarchy.
At least we still have the Golden Rule. They who have the gold make the rules.
To fight fracking bans, oil firms heavily outspend environmentalists
http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/To-fight-fracking-bans-oil-firms-heavily-5864369.php
"With a population of just 55,000 scattered among its hills, San Benito County seems an unlikely threat to California’s oil industry.
But come Tuesday, voters there will decide whether to ban fracking, acidizing and other “high-intensity” forms of oil extraction within the county’s borders. And the industry isn’t taking the challenge lightly.
San Benito is one of three California counties with fracking bans on this week’s ballot. And together, oil companies including Chevron Corp. and Occidental Petroleum have spent $7.7 million to defeat them. That’s more money than California’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, Neel Kashkari, has raised during his entire campaign.
Only one of the counties, Santa Barbara, is a major oil producer. San Benito has just 26 wells, and none has been fracked. The third county, Mendocino, has no active oil wells, according to state records.
But ban proponents consider hydraulic fracturing — which uses pressurized water, sand and chemicals to crack open oil-bearing rocks — a danger to California’s groundwater supplies, particularly at a time when three years of historic drought have drained aquifers. Better to stop it now, they say.
“To me, the water is the story,” said Tom Shepherd, an organic farmer in Santa Barbara County’s Santa Ynez Valley. “Here we are, in the midst of a drought, and you’re not concerned about your water and fracking? The aquifers have been drawn down. The rain we’ve had has been absorbed by the ground. The creeks don’t run.”
Used for decades
Oil companies consider fracking safe, saying they’ve used it in California for decades without a single documented case of groundwater contamination. They consider the proposed bans little more than an attempt to strangle oil production in the state.
“No one, to my knowledge, has fracked a well in San Benito County, and to my knowledge, no one is proposing to do that,” said Steve Coombs, whose small oil company, Patriot Resources, has a dozen wells in the county. “So why are we having an initiative about banning fracking? At the end of the day, it’s anti-fossil fuels.”
Fracking opponents have pushed repeatedly for a statewide ban or moratorium, only to see the idea die in Sacramento. Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown threw his weight behind legislation that let fracking continue while creating new regulations for the practice and launching a study of its potential dangers.
Frustrated, environmentalists shifted their focus to local politics. Santa Cruz County adopted a moratorium last year. The Los Angeles City Council followed suit in February.
Mostly in Kern County
The vast majority of fracking reported in California to date has taken place in one county — Kern, the heart of the state’s oil industry. No one expects a ban there anytime soon. But other counties may follow if San Benito, Santa Barbara and Mendocino voters block fracking. That, ban supporters say, explains the industry’s heavy spending.
“They might think that, as goes Santa Barbara County, so goes the state,” said Rebecca Claassen, a chiropractor and co-founder of Santa Barbara County Water Guardians.
Chevron, based in San Ramon, has donated $2.6 million to defeat the ballot measures, according to state records. Aera Energy has given $2.1 million; Occidental Petroleum, $2 million.
Backers of the Santa Barbara ban report raising $400,000. Their counterparts in San Benito have raised $120,000.
The ballot fight comes as oil companies try to develop the Monterey Shale, a vast oil-laden rock formation beneath the southern San Joaquin Valley. Although the federal government this year slashed its estimate of the amount of oil that can be squeezed from the shale using current technology, drillers continue probing the formation, saying it could one day yield an economic bonanza for the state.
The idea of an oil boom, however, troubles many rural residents. Fracking for oil and natural gas has transformed swaths of North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Texas, filling them with drill rigs, truck traffic and air pollution.
In San Benito County, a company called Citadel Exploration has been probing for oil on a 688-acre site that the company says holds enormous promise. Developing the field, near Pinnacles National Park, would likely require “several hundred wells,” Citadel announced in August......"
At least we still have the Golden Rule. They who have the gold make the rules.
To fight fracking bans, oil firms heavily outspend environmentalists
http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/To-fight-fracking-bans-oil-firms-heavily-5864369.php
"With a population of just 55,000 scattered among its hills, San Benito County seems an unlikely threat to California’s oil industry.
But come Tuesday, voters there will decide whether to ban fracking, acidizing and other “high-intensity” forms of oil extraction within the county’s borders. And the industry isn’t taking the challenge lightly.
San Benito is one of three California counties with fracking bans on this week’s ballot. And together, oil companies including Chevron Corp. and Occidental Petroleum have spent $7.7 million to defeat them. That’s more money than California’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, Neel Kashkari, has raised during his entire campaign.
Only one of the counties, Santa Barbara, is a major oil producer. San Benito has just 26 wells, and none has been fracked. The third county, Mendocino, has no active oil wells, according to state records.
But ban proponents consider hydraulic fracturing — which uses pressurized water, sand and chemicals to crack open oil-bearing rocks — a danger to California’s groundwater supplies, particularly at a time when three years of historic drought have drained aquifers. Better to stop it now, they say.
“To me, the water is the story,” said Tom Shepherd, an organic farmer in Santa Barbara County’s Santa Ynez Valley. “Here we are, in the midst of a drought, and you’re not concerned about your water and fracking? The aquifers have been drawn down. The rain we’ve had has been absorbed by the ground. The creeks don’t run.”
Used for decades
Oil companies consider fracking safe, saying they’ve used it in California for decades without a single documented case of groundwater contamination. They consider the proposed bans little more than an attempt to strangle oil production in the state.
“No one, to my knowledge, has fracked a well in San Benito County, and to my knowledge, no one is proposing to do that,” said Steve Coombs, whose small oil company, Patriot Resources, has a dozen wells in the county. “So why are we having an initiative about banning fracking? At the end of the day, it’s anti-fossil fuels.”
Fracking opponents have pushed repeatedly for a statewide ban or moratorium, only to see the idea die in Sacramento. Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown threw his weight behind legislation that let fracking continue while creating new regulations for the practice and launching a study of its potential dangers.
Frustrated, environmentalists shifted their focus to local politics. Santa Cruz County adopted a moratorium last year. The Los Angeles City Council followed suit in February.
Mostly in Kern County
The vast majority of fracking reported in California to date has taken place in one county — Kern, the heart of the state’s oil industry. No one expects a ban there anytime soon. But other counties may follow if San Benito, Santa Barbara and Mendocino voters block fracking. That, ban supporters say, explains the industry’s heavy spending.
“They might think that, as goes Santa Barbara County, so goes the state,” said Rebecca Claassen, a chiropractor and co-founder of Santa Barbara County Water Guardians.
Chevron, based in San Ramon, has donated $2.6 million to defeat the ballot measures, according to state records. Aera Energy has given $2.1 million; Occidental Petroleum, $2 million.
Backers of the Santa Barbara ban report raising $400,000. Their counterparts in San Benito have raised $120,000.
The ballot fight comes as oil companies try to develop the Monterey Shale, a vast oil-laden rock formation beneath the southern San Joaquin Valley. Although the federal government this year slashed its estimate of the amount of oil that can be squeezed from the shale using current technology, drillers continue probing the formation, saying it could one day yield an economic bonanza for the state.
The idea of an oil boom, however, troubles many rural residents. Fracking for oil and natural gas has transformed swaths of North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Texas, filling them with drill rigs, truck traffic and air pollution.
In San Benito County, a company called Citadel Exploration has been probing for oil on a 688-acre site that the company says holds enormous promise. Developing the field, near Pinnacles National Park, would likely require “several hundred wells,” Citadel announced in August......"
Article contains link to pdf of original transcript of the recording.
"Mr. Berman repeatedly boasted about how he could take checks from the oil and gas industry executives — he said he had already collected six-figure contributions from some of the executives in the room — and then hide their role in funding his campaigns.
“People always ask me one question all the time: ‘How do I know that I won’t be found out as a supporter of what you’re doing?’ " Mr. Berman told the crowd. “We run all of this stuff through nonprofit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors. There is total anonymity. People don’t know who supports us.”
No Toto, I don't think we're in democracy anymore.
If we can't find a way to repeal the Supreme Court's 'Citizens United decision, the power of big money and advertising will find enough fools who buy this stuff to sink this country.
“People always ask me one question all the time: ‘How do I know that I won’t be found out as a supporter of what you’re doing?’ " Mr. Berman told the crowd. “We run all of this stuff through nonprofit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors. There is total anonymity. People don’t know who supports us.”
No Toto, I don't think we're in democracy anymore.
If we can't find a way to repeal the Supreme Court's 'Citizens United decision, the power of big money and advertising will find enough fools who buy this stuff to sink this country.
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