A key component of President Barack Obama’s push for offshore oil drilling—an economic analysis touting the benefits of opening up waters in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic—was based on studies conducted by the fossil fuel industry, a new investigation reveals.
The “apparently impartial” analysis from the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) justified the offshore drilling proposal unveiled last month as having potential for “increased wages, additional jobs, increased tax collection, revenue sharing, and proximity of supply and consumers economic,” the nonprofit research group Public Accountability Initiative states in its report, Offshore Shilling: An Analysis of the Economic Studies Justifying the Department of Interior’s Offshore Drilling Plan.
Yet “buried in the BOEM report’s fine print, though, were footnotes shedding light on how the bureau came to its conclusions: it used studies from the same fossil fuel industry that could benefit from the expansion,” write reporters David Sirota and Clark Mindock for the International Business Times.
Eight of the nine studies cited in the bureau’s report came from authors or organizations with ties to the industry, including the American Petroleum Institute, the largest industry trade group with over 600 member organizations.
Four of the studies were directly funded by oil and gas companies or lobbying groups, while the other four were prepared by think tanks and “dark money advocacy groups” that also take funds from the fossil fuel industry, the Initiative reports.
None of them were peer-reviewed.
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