Fossil Fuel interests have wielded an extraordinary amount of influence inside the GOP going all the way back to the Eisenhower era. With their dream president in the White House eager to accommodate their every whim, they are turning up the pressure om Republicans in the congress to get their way on watering down the Russia Sanctions bill.
BY DEVIN HENRY
American oil and natural gas companies are pushing for changes to a massive expansion of economic sanctions on Russia, warning lawmakers that the new regulations would harm them, too.
House leaders are negotiating several fixes to a bill expanding economic penalties on Russia and Iran, which includes new limits on the extent to which American and Russian oil and gas companies can interact.
Energy companies are concerned with sections of the Russian sanctions that ban American investments supporting the “maintenance or expansion of the construction, modernization, or repair of energy pipelines by the Russian Federation.” The sanctions bill also bans investments that “directly and significantly [contribute] to the enhancement of the ability of the Russian Federation to construct energy export pipelines.”
Those provisions are intended to harm Russian energy companies, many of which are state-owned or closely tied to the Kremlin, and reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas.
Industry lobbyists are pushing for changes to the sanctions to allow them to cooperate with Russian companies (with ties to the Kremlin) as long as it isn’t a oil or gas field inside the Russian Federation.
Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said last week that lawmakers were considering fixing the bill “to [make] sure that we don’t actually inadvertently help Russian oligarchs and oil firms.”
Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), who is helping craft the House bill, said, “Unfortunately, the Senate version of the bill would give Russians the opportunity to weaponize these sanctions against American businesses.”
He added, “I believe we need to thoroughly look at this and make necessary changes to protect American job creators.”
Whenever I see the phrase “Job Creators” I know I’m being fed self-serving propaganda.
In a weekend op-ed in the Washington Examiner, the industry-funded Institute for Energy Research warned the sanctions bill “has the potential to affect a wide variety of industries — up and down the global energy, manufacturing, and engineering value chain.”
Of course any discussion of how sustainable the “global energy, manufacturing, and engineering value chain” needs to become in the near future, is conspicuously absent.