© Kirk Allen/Center for Public IntegrityMarathon Oil tar sands refinery in southwest Detroit.
When the Trump administration laid out a plan this year that would eventually allow cars to emit more pollution,
automakers, the obvious winners from the proposal, balked. The changes, they said, went too far even for them.
But it turns out that
there was a hidden beneficiary of the plan that was pushing for the changes all along: the nation's oil industry.In Congress, on Facebook and in statehouses nationwide,
Marathon Petroleum, the country's largest refiner, worked with powerful oil-industry groups and a conservative policy network financed by the billionaire industrialist
Charles G. Koch to run a stealth campaign to roll back car emissions standards, a
New York Times investigation has found.
The campaign's main argument for significantly easing fuel efficiency standards - that the United States is so awash in oil it no longer needs to worry about energy conservation -
clashed with decades of federal energy and environmental policy."With oil scarcity no longer a concern," Americans should be given a "choice in vehicles that best fit their needs," read a draft of a letter that Marathon helped to circulate to members of Congress over the summer. Official correspondence later sent to regulators by more than a dozen lawmakers included phrases or sentences from the industry talking points, and the Trump administration's proposed rules incorporate similar logic.
Comment: One wonders how the majority in France, who support the Yellow Vests protests over plummeting living standards and the corruption of Macron's government, feel about being used by the British taxpayer funded BBC for their sinister propaganda purposes? The BBC will also struggle to explain why similar movements are popping up all over Europe, and even further afield: 'Macron resign!' Yellow Vest protests enter 5th week - 33,000 people throughout France brave aggressive security forces
Although this behavior from the BBC is standard: