thebigp

by The Center for Public IntegrityJanuary 10, 2000
Vice President Al Gore acknowledges the crowd during his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles Thursday, Aug. 17, 2000. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
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On Sept. 7, 1995, Vice President Albert Gore Jr., stood on the White House lawn and talked in sweeping terms about ending the era of big government. He touted a list of recommendations formulated by the National Performance Review, an initiative Gore directed that he claimed streamlined the federal bureaucracy, cut unnecessary waste and helped make the government “work better and cost less.” Gore said that his report, delivered to President Clinton that day, would continue the drive to “reinvent government.”
Gore did not mention that his recommendations to the president included a plan to give oil companies access to thousands of acres of oil-rich, publicly owned land that the U.S. Navy has held as emergency reserves since 1912. Ever since the federal government earmarked the reserves for military emergencies, the oil industry had tried and failed to pry them away from the Navy.
In 1922 a couple of oil men Edward L. Doheny and Harry Sinclair bribed Albert Fall, the secretary of the interior in the Harding administration, for secret leases to drill on two of the fields, the Teapot Dome field just outside of Casper, Wyo., and the Elk Hills field in Bakersfield, Calif. Doheny and his Pan American Petroleum and T***sport Co. (later Atlantic Richfield Co, or ARCO), paid $300,000 to Fall in exchange for the rights. When the bribes were uncovered, the ensuing Teapot Dome scandal forced the resignations of Fall (who later went to prison), and Edward Denby, the secretary of the Navy.
IN 1973, DURING THE ARAB oil embargo, the Nixon administration tried to lease Elk Hills to boost domestic oil production. In 1984, 1986 and 1987, the Reagan administration proposed selling Elk Hills for a lump-sum payment of $1.5 billion that would go toward reducing the federal budget deficit. Each time, Congress wisely blocked the sale of Elk Hills.
But where Fall, Nixon and Reagan had failed, Gore succeeded. Despite the history of the naval petroleum reserves, despite the royalty revenues that the field continued to generate, Gore recommended that the government put Elk Hills on the auction block. Clinton took Gore’s advice and approved a deal to let oil companies buy some of the reserves. The White House then pushed to have language authorizing the sales inserted in the 1996 defense authorization bill, which Congress ultimately approved. Oil companies bid on the field and, finally, on Oct. 6, 1997, the Energy Department announced that the government would sell its interest in the 47,000-acre Elk Hills reserve to Occidental Petroleum Corp. for $3.65 billion. It was the largest privatization of federal property in U.S. history, one that tripled Occidental’s U.S. oil reserves overnight. During the months after the sale, Occidental tripled the amount of natural gas extracted from the field.
Although the Energy Department was required to assess the likely environmental consequences of the proposed sale, it didn’t. Instead it hired a private company, ICF Kaiser International, Inc., to complete the assessment. The general chairman of Gore’s p**********l campaign, Tony Coelho, sat on the board of directors.
Just hours after the announcement of the Elk Hills sale, Gore stood across town on the campus of Georgetown University and delivered a speech to the White House Conference on C*****e C****e on the “terrifying prospect” of g****l w*****g, a problem he attributed to the unchecked use of f****l f**ls such as oil.