A Strategic Approach to Stakeholder Communications
CAPP Speaker Series featuring Deryck Spooner: April 1st, 2015
Below is the speech and presentation by Deryck Spooner, Senior Director for External Mobilization for the American Petroleum Institute in Washington D.C. The entire speaker series video, featuring the audio for Deryck's speech can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GuIxc0aVLE
Deryck Spooner – Thank you for inviting me to come from the
U.S. to wonderful Calgary, the weather is beautiful. I actually didn’t bring a
coat or nothing, so I’m really happy about that. I think in D.C. now it’s about
60 degrees, very close to what you guys have here. Looking across the audience,
I am very excited because I do see a lot of young people like myself, which
means things are changing within the oil and gas industry, and that’s a good
thing. I also see a lot of females in the industry and it’s important that we
do diversify our industry. I’m really excited about that.
What we are going to talk about today is about passion, and
how do you sort of leverage, how do you motivate people based on that passion,
and right off the bat I can see how you guys were motivated here with your
passion to eat a free lunch. It’s a pretty significate thing, I came all the
way from the U.S. for a free lunch, so you can imagine how passionate I am
about free lunch. But what I want you guys to do is, well before I jump in, let
me take a minute to tell you exactly what I’m going to try to do.
First, I want to apologize for my accent, I’m originally
from the Caribbean but I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., so it’s kind of messed up
in terms of the language there. Also, I talk fast, I’m not a salesman, but I do
speak pretty fast. I do apologize. I have a short amount of time to talk to you
about grassroots organizations and grassroots campaigns. Something that really
takes at least a semester, so I am condensing a semester worth of work into
about a half hour. I’ll spend some time talking about passion, talking about
how you harness it, and then move from there on to understanding how passion
translates into the U.S. political process, and then move into more targeted
strategy for how you build a grassroots program, and then finish up with
looking at API and how API, the methods API utilized to build it’s own program
for the last five years and then finish up with a video that really gets into
what exactly we do.
So real quick, I want you guys to stop and think about
passion and what it really means to you. What makes you passionate, in broad
terms, it’s your fate, it’s your politics, it’s your family, and in some cases
with regards to issue it’s about health, health care issues and it’s about
education. The quick key question here is how do you, what motivates you into
that passion. In some cases, if you look at school, your kids at school because
of that passionate you have for education, it is a lot easier for you to spend
a lot of time volunteering at the school where your kids go to school, it’s a
lot easier to give money out of your pocket to a library that is being built,
just being really mad at the politicians and really going and protesting some
of the challenges you see in the educational system around the country here in
Canada and the US. So, passion, what it really does, it really motivates you to
act. And what I’m going to do today is spend some time helping you understand
how you can harness that passion to be able to take advantage of it. What is
passion? It is an intense, driving and overarching, over mastering feeling of
conviction.
Passion tends to drive you, to take some action like I said,
no necessarily the right action, but it does drive you to take action. To go to
the streets, we had some of our opposition decide to wrap a fake pipeline
around the white house, they were very passionate about it. It came from all
parts of the country, and sometimes, it causes you to make a fool of yourself,
but in the very least you have that passion. Our goal is to figure out how to harness
that passion.
So one things we know is that our opposition has it, we know
they really, really have it. The question for us as industry, is how do we get
it? How do we get a passion? How do we harness that passion? One of things that
we know in our industry, is that the value that we bring to the countries that
we represent, it’s pretty significant. But in America, most American’s have no
clue about the value of the oil and gas industry, outside of the fact that they
go to the gas pump, and pump that gas into the car. They have no clue of the
value of oil and gas. For us, we have to
show the value, we have to talk about all the other things that fossil fuels
are responsible for. The fertilizers that help get our food to the table, the
makeup that women use to look beautiful, the hair products, the phone, the cell
phones, the iPad. All those different things that would not be part of us and
be a part of our world without fossil fuels. So we have to find a way to be able
to harness and to explain that passion to people. So we would be able to
benefit from it.
I think another key thing for us is, passion is a big piece
of the political process, and we have to understand politically, and issue wise
how we are able to deal with it. I’m going to spend some time now really
getting into the U.S. political system. To really understand how passionate
most folks in the U.S. are about politics. Now when you look at the presidency
in the US, we have 538 electoral votes of which you need about 270 to win the
presidency. The question for you looking at those states, is how do you get to
those 270. I heard earlier Jeff talked about national, we are moving away from
a national politics and more towards a state and local approach, and that’s
what our politics have really gone to in the U.S. We don’t have a national
politics anymore; we have a state by state method and strategic way of
advancing of our politics and in order to actually win, it’s important for us
to understand on how to get to that 260.
So how do you do that? There is 5 key states that we call
early primary states in the US, you have Iowa, Florida, New Hampshire, South
Carolina and for us as an industry, it’s important that we get into those
states. It’s important that we sort of interject energy literacy into those
campaigns. Why? When you go to Iowa and you go to New Hampshire, you do a lot
of retail politics, you spend a lot of time kissing babies, shaking hands and
so forth. And if we as an industry don’t get in early and intercept these
presidential candidate’s, talk about energy and get energy into the political
discourse that is happening, we’ve lost. So we have to get into the
conversation very early on, and interject the importance of energy, the value
of energy, and how energy benefits in terms of economy, jobs that are created
within the U.S.
The Senate is pretty key for us, right now you see the make-up
that just changed, over 54 republicans, 45 democrats, that’s important. Why? Right
now the discourse in the senate is horrible. We have moved away from a simple
majority of 51 votes to now needing 60 votes in order to move public policy,
and we have moved from 60 votes, which is actually needed in order to get
something to the floor to get a vote on, to 67 votes, so the bar has raised in
the U.S. You need 67 votes to ensure to be able to defeat a presidential veto
in order to get any type of public policy across. It’s important to understand
that we need to also go into these key senate areas to be able to interject
energy literacy and what’s going on at that level. This is the house and it’s a
lot of red, 245 members, this is pretty much historic, but there’s no
conversation happening at this level. And there is no conversation happening
inside the belt, but for us it’s about the belt, where meaning inside of D.C.,
verses outside of belt way, and in order to be able to influence both the house
and senate in the US, you need to influence the outside of the belt. Where you
need to go into their districts, you need to go into their states, and have
significant conversations, and get other key individuals to have conversations
about energy.
The Governors, this is where a lot of the legislative regulatory
activities are occurring right now. The Governors is where a lot of stuff is
happening right now, a bit similar to your premiers in your different provinces
with the exception of the power. Our governors are still dependant on the
federal government to make things happen, but more importantly, these guys are
the ones that are moving policy right now because of the gridlock that is
occurring in Washington, this is where you have significant amount of
activities occurring as it relates to infrastructure. When we talk about energy
infrastructure right now, our battle is at the state level and these guys are
the ones driving the car, and we need to be able to really motivate these guys
to do the right thing. But more importantly, they are all very egotistic. At
some point these guys end up being the next President of the United States of
America and you can see some of these candidates, some better than others. I
know you guys have been seeing on the news with what’s going on with Governor
Pence from Indiana, you never heard anything about him before until the last
week or so simply because he has interjected a religious bill which is very
controversial. In the U.S., it’s all about politics, and for him how does he
put his name rep up, he puts something controversial out there, and now
everyone is coming after him and now everyone knows him. So it’s very strategic,
these guys are the next faces, these guys are the ones who drive policy within
their state and it’s important for us, whether were from Canada or from the U.S.,
it’s important for us that we understand how to motivate these individuals
particularly because of the ego that they have. They all have a reason of being,
they all want to be the next President of United States of America, and if you
can understand that, then you will be able to understand how to sort of
motivate these individuals.
So, I was talking about industry challenges, and because of
all the gridlock in Washington we have moved away from the inside of the belt focus,
our opposition has moved away, we have had some really good wins, believe it or
not, in the last 5 years at the federal level. If you look, we haven’t had any
new taxes on the industry in the last 5 years, climate change, although it
passed through the house, it’s never gone anywhere else, RFS, ozone, all the
key things that we as in industry care about out in the US, we have won.
So, what has our opposition done? They said okay, well we
need to go out and move out to the people. They have gone out to the state, to
the local level. And for us, it’s important that we are able to combat them at
that level. Now I say that, that is in the U.S. Believe it or not, that is
outside of the U.S., they have migrated now outside of the U.S., in Canada, in
Europe, in Africa, and other places, so this not a phenomena that is just in
the U.S. These folks are going into other places because they realize they can
get to the people, and most people don’t have time to worry, so if you tell
someone something they believe you, because they’re so caught up in everyday
life they just don’t have time, so we need to find ways to get to people.
The answer for us is building a strong advocacy level, again,
outside of the belt way and into the state capitals throughout the U.S. There’s
three key things for us: constituencies hold the power, every elected official
cares about one thing, how they get re-elected. That’s their fundamental thing
that they have inside, how do I get re-elected. And you get elected two ways,
either you have enough money to get the votes or you actually go out and knock
on as many doors as you can and actually get the voters to the polls on behalf
of you. For us, we have the same ability to get to those constituents, and it’s
important that we actually get to those constituents as early as possible.
Power is in numbers, having people in those communities and those congressional
districts, or those municipalities or townships, those counties, those provinces,
getting to those individuals that would actually go to the polls and have a
conversation with them, a real conversation about the value of energy in their
lives and how they should speak up for that which is very important us to do.
Then the ultimate, which is to provide political cover,
every elected official will want to know that if they are going to do something
on behalf of any industry, that they have the political cover in their
district. That their constituents support it, that the businesses in their
community, that their leaders in that community, that their civic groups in the
community have some sort of support for what that issue is all about and that’s
how they will support you, so that is very important.
In terms of building an effective program, there is four key
components that you need to have. I’m all about making sure that I do a lot of
research, I do not go into any situation unless I do a significant amount of
research and to me, these four things are very important.
Issue
Analyses
- What’s the pro’s and con's
- What’s the situation that is happening
- Who’s for you
- Who’s against you
It’s very important that you understand those things when it
comes to issues, so you have to go out there and do a significant amount of
issue analysis. Community assessment, I think the most important thing in anything
we do is a community assessment, this is where you do a lot of quantitative and
qualitative analyses, focus groups, polling. The ultimate goal is to have an
idea of what is going on in that community. How do you find that soul of that
community, what motivates each individual in that community to come out and
support you. It’s very, very important. So, as we start thinking about pipelines
or infrastructure work, I know we have a lot of engineers in the room that is
great, we love you all, I wouldn’t have a job without you guys. But it’s
important to know that if we are building a pipeline route across whatever, it is
also important to understand what are the community effects of that route that
you’re actually going to put that pipeline through. It’s important that you go
to every route and have a conversation with that community. Assess the
community to get a better sense, and then when you assess the community you
have a sense of who holds the stake within that community. As you do a stakeholder
analysis, right, who’s the power player in that. You have to do a power analysis,
you have to map out that community to understand how that community functions.
Who has a stake if we win, who has a stake if we lose. Those things are very
fundamental and very important as we are able to move and get these pipelines
through. And then finally the political assessment, what is the politics, who
are the key political players in the state, what do these elected officials
need to be able to support, very important in terms of how we move our program
forward.
There are some keys things here in terms of engagement and
there is a couple of things not on here, so if you look at the bottom we have
political families, one of the things we do a lot of, because in the U.S.,
everything is around politics, believe this. In the U.S., everything is about
politics, our lives is around politics. And I was telling some folks this
morning, the reason why is, if you are not at the table then you are on the menu,
and we never want to be on the menu. That’s important. So we have spent a lot
of time doing what we call political family intercepts. So Iowa, South
Carolina, New Hampshire, Florida, and Nevada are all key early primary states.
So as the candidates go through those states, we have folks on the ground that
would intercept those candidates early and talk to them about the value in our industry,
talk about energy, so if they are the podium we will ask them questions: What
is your energy plan? Do you support hydraulic fracturing? That’s important we
have to challenge them to think about the value of energy, and if we don’t do
that we are in trouble.
Another thing we do is we go door to door, we spend a lot of
time knocking on people’s doors and having a conversation about those
individuals, we do a lot of house parties. We ask individuals to invite 10 to
20 of their neighbors in a four block radius or so to talk about energy. Those
are the important things to do.
You look at social media, Twitter is the most fundamental
new thing we have out there. Most Americans believe in what they read on
Twitter. Can you believe that? They do. People don’t go to the newspaper
anymore, they go on Twitter. They get up every morning, go on Twitter and look
at what’s going on. You know. A sentence, 20 words or less and people believe
it. So the competition that we have on social media is very important, and we
have to have voices on that, and I know it’s a cultural shift for a lot of the
oil and gas industry companies, but we have to get involved because, again, we
don’t want to be on the menu.
Then the whole thing around events, we do a lot of
events in the key battleground states, these are the states you need to win to
get the electoral votes to win the presidency. We do a lot of paid media, we
get into a lot of micro media which are these small newspapers, and in the US
we have these small neighbourhood newspapers. For example in the Capitol Hill
we have the Hill Rag, which is about mom's in the hill. Which is a about a bunch
of mom's that have this website, but they’re powerful. This is one of the most
powerful woman I’ve ever seen, and you just put one thing in and it goes all
around Capitol Hill and believe me it’s trouble. So, being able to really look
at some of these key tools you have over there, and leverage it to get your
message out, is pretty much fundamental.
Now API, when I came aboard five years ago and they asked me
to build this program, utilizing some of the same techniques that I sort of
discussed in the last couple of slides. The first thing I looked at is what
sort of base of support do we have in the oil and gas industry. And when I looked
at that base, the first thing is saw was that base was old, it was white, it
was male and it was conservative. And that did not reflect the faces within the
U.S. Particularly when you have a significant demographic shift that is
occurring within our country, where the majority of our population in about a
decade is going to be African American’s, Latino’s, and Asian. So, for us as an
industry, how do we benefit from that, particularly at about the same time in
about seven to ten years, we are going to have a what we call a big crew change,
at least in the U.S., we have about 9.8 million people, at least half of those
are supported by the oil and gas industry will retire. So the baby boomers. So,
how do you replenish that pipeline with human capital that is as diverse as
possible, it’s something that we needed to capture.
So, as I start building out my program, I start thinking
about the perception of the general public towards the industry, what is the
perception of the industry employees towards the industry, what is the
perception of non-traditionalists towards the industry, what do strategic
partners think about us. Four key tools for us to think about, and then the
goal is how do we start looking at all these different folks and put in some
programmatic things. Of which energy citizens, energy nations, energy forums,
we’re the key tools that we put forth, to be able to capture all these
different constituency groups that matter, that could actually have a voice on
behalf of the oil and natural gas industry in the U.S. Energy citizens today,
we have about 1.5 million, that’s in all 435 congressional districts. Our
program that we built at API has the ability to affect members in all 435
congressional districts, and all 50 states within the U.S. and the territories.
That is important because of the size of our industry, we have to make an
impact, we don’t apologize for anything, but one of the things that we know is
a big challenge in the oil and gas industry is literacy. People don’t
understand who we are, people are not educated about us, we need to do a better
job of educating individuals about it.
Outside of those three, so energy nation, this captures the
voice of industry – employees, retirees, suppliers and vendors, and having
those voices be heard before congress on behalf of industry. Energy forums, these
are all for political hacks like myself, people that have managed numerous
political campaigns over the years across the country, and what we ask them to
do is go and have a conversation with non-traditional in the state that they
represent. It’s very important for us to ensure we don’t just talk to people
who look like us, who sung like us and who support us. Businesses, farm
bureaus, manufacture associations, we have to get out of that, and talk to
women, talk to African Americans, talk to the NWCP’s, talk to the congressional
black caucus, talk to the Hispanic congressional caucus. A good example, when
you add the number of members of congress from the congressional Hispanic
caucus to the congressional black caucus to the congressional Asian caucus, you
have a block of votes of anywhere from 100 to 120. That’s pretty significant,
when you talk about only having 435 members of congress on the house side,
obviously. So, if you have that block of vote, and you need anywhere between
218 votes to actually make an impact, you are almost there. And so for us, what
we have learned, we have never reached out to these groups before, we’ve never
had to. So, now that we are reaching out to them and actually spending a lot of
time educating them about the value of our industry, low utility costs, low gas
prices, other values in terms of jobs, in terms of tax base, in terms of new
roads, schools in their communities. What we find, is that they sort of
understand us and see us in a different place than they did before. Not just
these big corporate folks that don’t care and want to come and abuse our
citizenry, but they add value. They add value to what we do. And so it’s
important for us to reach out to these individuals.
In terms of API, this is a sort of our national, state and
local reach. API has petroleum councils in 34 states and that’s a big deal for
us. So the red states is where we have strong, really strong coverage. Where we
feel that any issue that comes after us, that we can make an impact and
actually turn back those issues. In the tan state this is where we are so – so,
we do have strong programs there, but we still have to work there with folks.
The red states is where our members wanted us to focus our efforts. So that is
where our board of directors have us focusing our efforts at. But when you add
up the number of electoral votes, and I talked you guys about 500 and needing
about 270 in order to win the presidency, we have in those 34 states, we have
351 electoral votes and that is very impactful for us. When you look at the
battleground states, we are in most, 90% of the battleground states we are in,
and that’s important. That’s important and relates to making an impact on
industry. On sort of the political discourse that happens that’s not related to
our industry.
For us, it’s all about moving local, for the last five
years, we actually spend most of our efforts building relationships at the
state, local level. Making sure we have local influences, making sure that we
have the industry and the assets that the state has speak up. If you have a
refinery, we will put up the refinery manager to make sure that he or she, but
mostly he, that they go around their refinery and have a conversation with the
stakeholders around the refineries. If there is a pipeline running around, we
make sure we education the people in those communities about that pipeline. And
the biggest piece of the energy is the voters, right. So I talk to you about
three: energy nation, energy citizens, and energy forums. We have a fort that
we don’t talk much about, but it’s about micro targets and you heard Jeff talk
about it. Basically, what a micro target is, at least in the U.S. and I don’t
know what it is called here, but in the U.S. it is called a vote-a-file, and a
vote-a-file is a data base that houses all the information about you as a
voter, your voting history is in that database. So, what we do is we go into
that database, and we look for four out of four and three out of four past
voting history. If I’m running a political campaign, and if any one of you guys
want to run a political campaign and you want to win you call me. the first
thing I do, is do an analysis of the voting history. Science taught us that you
need to look at the last four elections to make a determination of what it
takes to actually win this presidency election. So we go back to the last four elections,
and we look at how people voted in the primary, and the general of those
elections.
So, what we do then is we take a universe of about 3000
people, and we spend 45 minutes with them and ask them a series of energy
questions, and based on how they answer those questions we create a profile of
those individuals. When we take that profile and we overlay that onto the
database on the vote-a-file and we purchase those records. When we purchase
those records, the next thing we did was look at consumer data, how you shop,
where you shop, we look at information on computers in terms of how you shop,
there are a lot of cookies on your google when you’re on your internet that
show where you shop. There are a lot of different companies out there that
house how you behave online, how you behave in terms of your shopping habits. And
we marry those two up, political with consumer data. And then we actually purchase
those records. To date, we have about 32.8 million in 34 states across America.
Why is that important? That’s important because this is the same type of thing
that political parties do to win. So, the only other entity that has the same
type of thing that we do is the Democratic Party and the Republican Party in
the U.S. So, this is how we are able to actually apply pressure on elected
officials particularly as it relates to our issue.
Our national reach, we have the ability to impact 68 US
senators and 275 members of congress, and again, why is that important? Because
we need 218 to actually to pass anything out of the house. In terms of states,
we can impact 34 governors, thousands of municipalities and counties across the
U.S. That’s important as folks go local, we have the ability to impact the
constituencies of these elected officials at the local level. Then this year, I
think is the key in terms of allies and strategic partners, we spend a
significant amount of time with labor unions, I know you guys have a lot of
labor unions in this country. The keystone pipeline was a big deal and actually
resonated with Americans simply because of labor unions. The fight was not oil
and gas, if it was I think we would have been in a different situation, not
that we would be in a great situation, but we would definitely be different
situation. But because you saw labor unions fighting the fight out there, it
changed the perception of most American’s. Why? Because when you look at the
importance of the labor unions, in 2008, our presidential elections, the
building trades spent nearly three hundred million dollars, they did the same
thing in the 2012 elections. That’s important. They know how to organize and
know how to spend money.
In terms of our minority outreach, I told you we spend a lot
of time with African American’s, Native American’s, Asian American’s. Our
strategic outreach to academics and agriculture chamber are typical, we feel
good there. Where our real challenge is on the demographic side which is students,
and women. In the U.S., we’re losing woman in a significant way, simply because
they care about safety and environment and they just don’t trust us. If you
look at the make-up for our electorate, nearly about 51% to 55% of the electorate
in the U.S. is woman. They are the key voters and so if we don’t make an impact,
and change perception of this industry, we will have a significant amount of
challenges as we move forward. I would assume that this would probably be the
same here in Canada. Seniors, we do well, except for the baby boomers. As they
get older and make their money now, they actually want to protect these places.
Places like the Gulf region, eastern Atlantic, Myrtle Beach, you know those
places where they go buy their second and third homes. These people working in
our industry are fighting us now; they made money from our industry and
actually are fighting us right now. So again, we have to be very strategic when
it comes to how we deal with those folks. And our veterans, we have a veterans
for energy program and it’s one of the most important programs that we have.
One of the reasons is that Veterans are a big deal in the U.S. right now. When
we are doing a fly-in and we bring 30 to 40 veterans into D.C., there is not an
office they go into that a senator is not there ready to greet them. That’s
very important in terms of how you are actually meeting them, but they
understand the value of the industry. They have had to go and fight on behalf
of the oil and natural gas in other countries. They understand that the fleet
out there, and different ships can’t move without oil and natural gas. And they
understand the value of energy security, they understand the value of what we
can do when Putin said he was going to stop that pipeline from going from the
Ukraine to Europe, they understand that we, here in North America, have the
ability to actually make a difference for the folks in Europe. Right, so it’s
important to spend a lot of time with Veterans.
So again, I wanted you give guys a real quick understanding,
that video is all the work we did leading up to the presidential campaign of
2012. We are actually doing the same thing; we will update the video leading up
to 2016 vote for energy. We see the value of utilizing those opportunities
again to get the word out about energy, forcing the candidates to create some
sort of energy plan that make sense in the U.S., but the new numbers that we
have, we have a total mobilization asset of 34.5 million, and so some of those
numbers were a little bit old, but the program is just an amazing program. We
have a lot of governors and senators calling us up and saying “hey how can we
get that, how can we purchase that,” but again for us it’s about putting
pressure. The one thing we have not done yet, and it will happen someday, I
don’t know if it will when I’m there still. But we have not gone after elected
officials, we have not been putting members with the elected officials we care
about or take out the ones we don’t like. We have the ability to that, but that’s
something we will never do because our members don’t want us to do that. But
that’s how strong of a program it is, it’s needed, we have seen a significant
amount of changes within our industry as a result of this program, we’re
respected now, we have voices in congress at the state house, the state
capitals across the country. When something happens, people call us before they
actually go and put public policy that might be impactive on the industry. So,
I’m hoping that we can help again, take this same type of strategy and bring it
here to Canada, because it’s not about the tools, the methodology that we use could
work anywhere. We just have to understand the environment, the political
landscape that we are in. However, keep in mind that the methodology works.
Thank you.
Q & A
Q: When we talk about politics and communications, particularly
American style politics, which comes with some connotations in Canada, the
concern is that it can be very polarizing, the concern is that it could harden positions
of opponents, and people who might be inclined to support us, might help us
drive them away. What has been your experience in helping to bring more people
into the conversations and try to minimize some of that polarization?
A: In
the US, it is polarizing; I would say any candidate in the US running for
President could start out from any place. We have a 45/45%, so if you are a Republican,
and you never ran for office and you want to run for Presidency, you automatically
have 45% of the vote. So what people fight for is that 10% in the middle. What
you do then, is that people are really disenchanted by our political process.
And it is important that you meet people at where they are. So a lot of what we
do is go to the doors and visit these individuals, host a lot of house parties
and have conversations with them and talk about the value of the electoral
process. Not necessarily about the candidates, but about the process, and how
they should actually participate within that process. But more importantly,
finding an issue that they could actually rally around in that political
process, and the hope for us that issue is energy. We have been able to
motivate a lot of individuals to really see energy as the value for why they’re
going to the polls. But that is the only way you would be able to do that, is
finding in the people some sort of issue. People just don’t like candidates
anymore.
Q: I
like your emphasis on the positive message, I like the education. I didn’t hear
a thing about climate change. The pipelines have nothing to do with pipelines,
they have everything to do with fossil fuels. Have you deliberately chosen not
to fight the battle on that ground? We’re always accused of being climate
change deniers on that kind of thing. But you seem to have developed your
strategy away from that controversial issue, maybe an unproven issue, and you
are focusing very much on the positive. Do you have another aspect where you
deal with the science or are you reaching people where they feel energy in
their lives?
A: So climate change in the U.S. was a pretty
significant issue around 2010, but the bill never passed through the senate. It
passed the house but never made it through the senate. Which would then go up to
President Obama to sign, it sort of died down. So it moved away, and it wasn’t
an issue that we needed to focus on. What we needed to do in the U.S., was
begin to build a base of support in key communities across the country, knowing
that climate change would come back up. So everything we did, we knew what was
going to occur. What we have seen in the last ten months is that every issue
that has been put out by our opposition is through the lens of climate
change. So Oil Sands – Climate Change,
Pipelines – Climate Change, Offshore – Climate Change, Hydraulic Fracturing –
Climate Change, and part of that is simply because of where the president is
going in the U.S. right now. He has made climate change one of the fundamental
parts of his legacy. Looking at December this year in Paris, they actually do
something with post Kyoto. I don’t know whether that has happened, but what
that has done is it has motivated our opposition to find ways to raise money
under the issue of climate change. But if you look at what is going on in our
country, climate change is really not a big issue by the average American. It
is by a small group of people, and we are watching it, but more important for
us and more important for Canada is to lay the groundwork in the key
communities that you see, that you think the fight is going to happen. Particularly
along routes of where we are actually moving and building new infrastructure
projects.
Q: We
always hear about the coal lobby and never about the oil or gas lobby, is there
anything we can learn from the coal lobby that seems to be very strong?
A: I really
don’t want to learn anything from the coal lobby, because if you look at where
coal is right now, it’s nowhere. I think we as an industry, we have done a lot
better work simply because you don’t hear about us. We keep a very low profile,
we are very strategic. We care about winning, we know for a fact that it’s
important if we show other faces verses faces of the industry, so we try to build
a lot of coalitions in communities that we go into, coalitions that look like
the community, which is very different than the coal. The coal lobby, it is
very strong and you have key senators like Senator Bird who passed or Senator Rockefeller,
who would do anything, they would die for coal. I think the only senator we had
in the U.S. that would die for oil and gas was Senator Benson back in Texas way
back when. It is a different day, and the whole issue of why coal lobby doesn’t
make sense is because of campaign reforms that we have had in the U.S., which
has changed the game in doing back room deals, and having conversations verses
going out into the real public and having a real dialogue with Americans. That
has changed the game. But the coal lobby is not in a good place right now.
Q: How
do you maintain that level of support and engagement with energy citizens when
there isn’t an elections, you know when there isn’t a ballot question, or when
there isn’t a specific project to rally support behind and or counter
opposition. When it’s just we want people to be confident and supportive of oil
and gas in general?
A: I
think it’s important that you continue the dialog with individuals in the space
you have them in. For us it’s energy nations, energy citizens is the data base
where we have a significant amount of supporters. And the way we deal with that,
is we sort of line individuals up along the areas that they care about. So if
they are passionate about offshore drilling, if they are passionate about
hydraulic fracturing, if they are passionate about schools, we sort of bring them
together with using social media tools within our database so that they could
have conversations with each other. It’s a way to motivate them and to actually
continue to act on different things. Some of the other things we do is to find
games, find challenges within our database. We will also do outside digs where
we will invite them to come to some sort of house party, we invite them to do a
webinar, where we would have an actual Senator or a member of the house, or we
have Jack Gerard on a webcast, where we have anywhere from five to ten thousand
people just talking about energy. So you have to keep these people in line or
else you will lose them. So you have to keep that sort of passion that they
have and you have to do it in different ways.
Q: Do
you see any value in being seen as an advocate for energy efficiency or energy
conservation, do have that in your mandate anywhere at all?
A: Yes,
the way we approach our outreaches, we are for all of the above. And if you
look at the state of our American energy, we do a state of American energy
event every year in January, in D.C. It’s usually the week before the state of
the union that the President does, and this year we focused on all sources of
energy, efficiency, wind, solar, nuclear, biomass, you name it, and we had all
those individuals write a couple of pages within our notebook. I will make sure
we actually get it out to you guys. But for us, it’s all about energy, it’s all
the above. It’s the only way we will actually be able to get across, but most
importantly it’s the only way to get advocates to support our interests.
Q: In
Canada we have seen environmental NGO’s take the strategy that undermining the
public confidence in regulatory authorities, and independent ones is a way to
advance their mission. It’s my thesis that we have work to do if we are
supportive of resource activities in that realm. What are thoughts on that?
A: Our
opposition is a lot smarter now and they actually have a lot more resources
then they had. A good example a former mayor of New York city, Bloomberg, just
gave 50 million dollars to the Sierra Club to go back to do their beyond coal
campaign, right now they have a beyond an oil and gas campaign. First when they
were doing the beyond coal campaign, the bridge fuel that they had was natural
gas, so they were very supportive of natural gas and now they are not
supportive of natural gas. Which is very telling as they don’t care for fossil
fuels, and so what we are seeing at the local level, they are doing a lot to
undermine the regulatory process, and partly what we see happening is that they
are going to key legislators at the state level, the county level or
municipality level. They are sort of picking and choosing which one to go to
and they have those individuals put local control issues before the legislature
or whatever elected that body you have. And for us, one of the key things that
we have seen that actually helped overcome these things, is early on education
with those elective officials. Most of the elective officials, like again most
of the American citizens in our country, don’t understand the value of energy
and how it matters to them. So we have been fighting those things and we are
actually winning those things in terms of the regulatory process at the state
level.
Another thing we see, and it’s definitely something you guys
should look at, is the whole divestment campaign, I don’t know if you guys have
seen that yet in Canada. We have 350.org going to all these big universities in
the US. The Ivy league, the Harvard, the Yale’s of the world, and asking them
to divest all their stocks in the oil and gas industry, and some of the
universities have done that and some of them are seeing the impact right now on
the effects. Now keep in mind, in our country, everyone is invested in the oil
and gas industry and most people don’t even know that. Most pensions, are
invested in the oil and gas industry, if you divest in one you lose
significantly on the other. So they are being very smart, and they are not
going to stop, and they are the reason why I have a job and I’m happy for that,
but we have to be very, very smart and very strategic, and we have to think
ahead of the game in order to win these things. And we can do it, why? Most
people do not understand who we are as an industry, they don’t. Now again keep
in mind, when we have done a significant amount of polling, and focus groups,
and the most that people think about us is when they go down to the gas station
and pump that gas. Or when they come into their house and turn on their switch
and the light comes on. They don’t know what happens, they just want that light
on. We have to do a lot of energy literacy and we have to spend a lot of time.
We have to know that it has to be long term, it’s not a short-term fix or else
we lose, because our opposition is not going away. And, like I said they have
migrated across the waters right now. I have been talking to Shell in Europe, the
British, they have all seen a significant amount of state local battles in
their countries and now they come to us to figure out how to put a program
together for that because it’s not stopping.
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