Big Energy at the Table

Newsweek, May, 2001 by Howard Fineman and Michael Isikoff (With Mark Hosenball, T. Trent Gegax and Rich Thomas in Washington)

If you were in the oil and gas business, it was a meeting that dreams were made of. Nine days before George W. Bush was inaugurated, energy lobbyists gathered at the American Petroleum Institute's offices in downtown Washington. Their agenda: to write a wish list. One participant remembers it fondly. "The tone was, 'OK, what do you guys want? You are going to have the ear of this White House'." In came an easel and a whiteboard, and ideas flowed: looser rules for drilling on federal lands; more drilling for oil and gas in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico; lower royalty payments for tapping offshore wells. After a while, the mood in the room grew giddy. The man from the wildcatters' association suggested going All the Way. It was time, he said, to rethink the Endangered Species Act....

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