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TexasTowelie

(111,288 posts)
Wed Dec 4, 2019, 07:56 AM Dec 2019

Joe Barton Resurfaces with a Blueprint for How to Bail Out the Oil Industry and Worsen Climate

Joe Barton Resurfaces with a Blueprint for How to Bail Out the Oil Industry and Worsen Climate Change


The legislation was marked with the number of the beast.

Joe Barton’s staffers, perhaps sensing some irony, insisted that he reintroduce his 2015 bill that proposed lifting the federal ban on crude oil exports. Were the bill to pass it would unleash a frenzied oil and gas boom in West Texas’ Permian Basin, which would, almost certainly, help fuel the effects of catastrophic climate change. So perhaps the bill’s original number—HR 666—would’ve been more appropriate.

Alas, Barton is a politician, not a poet, and he refiled his legislation, and, after an aggressive lobbying campaign, the ban was lifted.

After a private picture leaked in 2017, Barton opted not to run for the North Texas congressional seat he had held since 1985 and fell out of the public eye. But this week he reemerged with a lengthy retrospective in the Dallas Morning News humbly titled “I knew my bill to lift the ban on U.S. oil exports was important. I hardly expected it to change the world.” It’s an unusually revealing account of how Barton greased the congressional skids for one of the most consequential policies for oil and gas and the environment in modern political history.

In a newsworthy tidbit buried as an endnote to the column, readers learn that Barton is preparing to launch a “federal policy consulting business.” Knowing that, the op-ed—which reads as a blueprint for building political support for corporate America’s agendas—sure seems like a helpful way to gin up a client base.

Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/joe-barton-resurfaces-with-a-blueprint-for-how-to-bail-out-the-oil-industry-and-worsen-climate-change/
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Joe Barton Resurfaces with a Blueprint for How to Bail Out the Oil Industry and Worsen Climate (Original Post) TexasTowelie Dec 2019 OP
you mean THIS ... gagging... Joe Barton? Fambly and oil values JB? CurtEastPoint Dec 2019 #1
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