North Carolina and Virginia Businesses Oppose Atlantic Offshore Drilling

Outer Banks beach

If one lives in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia or the Outer Banks of North Carolina, after the military and the U.S. government spending, the number one driver of the economy is tourism, especially tourism focused on the regions' beaches and waterways.  As I have noted before on this blog, years ago I was in-house counsel for a Fortune 50 company's oil and gas subsidiary, so I do know a thing or two about oil and gas explorations and offshore drilling (I even negotiated concession agreements with foreign governments).  While no oil company wants a drilling disaster, as the BP nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico made clear, accidents do happen and the economic and environmental consequences are dire.    Here are highlights from Think Progress on opposition to Atlantic offshore drilling:

For coastal companies that depend on a healthy stream of tourists to keep business healthy, the prospect of drilling in the Atlantic Ocean means one thing: spills that will sully beaches and drive visitors away.

More than 300 Atlantic coast businesses sent a letter to President Obama Thursday, urging him to take back his administration’s proposal to allow drilling in the Atlantic Ocean. In January, the Obama administration announced a proposal to sell oil and gas leases in offshore sites from Virginia to Georgia.

In the letter, the businesses outline the economic risk posed by offshore drilling, saying that monetary losses due to lost tourism revenue could be “devastating.” They also note that the Energy Information Administration estimates that the Atlantic Ocean holds only about 209 days’ worth of oil and 13 months’ worth of natural gas.

“Offshore drilling is incompatible with our tourism and fishing industries. When you drill, you spill, and day to day drilling operations result in chronic pollution and the industrialization of the coast for oil facilities,” the letter reads. “Look no further than the devastation the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe brought to the Gulf of Mexico’s fishing, tourism and wildlife to recognize the impact drilling would have here on the Atlantic Coast.”

Jeff Downey, owner of the Savannah, Georgia restaurant Circa 1875 and one of the signatories of the letter, said on a press call Thursday that about 85 percent of his business during the summer comes from tourists.
“If they allow offshore drilling, it will ruin our coasts first of all, and people will just stop coming,” he said. Savannah is in a hurricane zone, he said, and though hurricanes there have been rare over the last century, he worries a major storm could damage a drilling rig and cause a spill.

Cola Vaughan, owner of Cola Vaughan Realty on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, was another one of the business owners who signed on to the letter. He said businesses in the Outer Banks depend heavily on pristine beaches to attract visitors, and that even a “perceived threat” of spills would cause potential vacationers to think twice about choosing the Outer Banks.
It makes sense for businesses to be worried about a major spill. The Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 people and sent millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, took a toll on Gulf businesses. An estimated $22.7 billion in Gulf tourism money was lost from 2010 through 2013 because of the spill.  

The 300 businesses hope adding their names to the opposition will help convince the administration to give up plans for Atlantic drilling. 

“Our coasts are worth too much to risk,” they write in the letter. “Rather than exposing our beaches, families and businesses to the inherent risks of drilling, we need to move this country in the direction of renewable energy.”

In the interest of full disclosure, the husband and I live on a tidal creek, and a major oil spill offshore from Hampton Roads could foul the creek behind our home.

Our backyard and Robinson Creek last fall

The Power of Coming Out at Work

Lord Browne

Living in the closet is psychological and emotionally damaging.  Moreover, it takes a huge amount of time and effort that would be/is better spent on living a fulfilling life that is not haunted by the fear of being "outed."   In the business world being in the closet is similarly detrimental and wastes energy and creativity that could be better used to further one's business and career.  Sadly, since 29 states still provide no employment protections to LGBT employees, many still feel the need to hide their real lives at work.  I was in the closet at work after coming out for several years and it was exhausting.  Former BP CEO John Browne looks at the issue in a column in The Advocate.  Here are excerpts:

But by deciding to disclose his sexuality, [Apple CEO Tim] Cook has united his public and private lives. He will no longer have to devote valuable energy to concealing part of his identity, energy that can now be used productively in the pursuit of more fulfilling personal and professional lives. He has shown bravery many others and I did not have.

In an effort to maintain my double life, I made three fatal errors of judgement. First, in an attempt to reduce the risk of somebody finding out my secret, I met a man on an escort website. Second, I built a relationship with him, and was surprised when he sold our story to a British tabloid newspaper. Third, I went to court in an attempt to protect my privacy and lied in a legal document about how we met each other. I reversed that lie within days, but the case eventually collapsed. I resigned and lost the career that had structured my entire professional life.

When I was dragged out of the closet, my worst fears did not come true. I gained friends, lead a more fulfilling private life, and have a wider set of business contacts as a result. Many of the people I interviewed for The Glass Closet expressed a desire to come out, but only when “the time is right.” For some, that meant after a promotion, and for others — particularly athletes — it meant after retirement. For me, the “right time” would never come because I had invested too much in my double life.
Evidence suggests that around one third of LGBT people remain in the closet at work. In writing The Glass Closet, I spoke to men and women around the world who, despite living in an age of diversity targets, LGBT corporate networks, and equal marriage, are still afraid of the consequences of coming out. That takes a personal toll on them; they fail to build a unified private and professional life, to the detriment of both. But it also takes a huge toll on their businesses, which suffer when employees do not feel included and are preoccupied by something other than their work. Companies with a fully engaged workforce outperform their peers by an average of 2% per year, every year for 20 years. The return to an inclusive environment is enormous, and in my experience, there are two things that business leaders can do to create that environment for LGBT people.

The first is to set the right tone from the top. Leaders who take LGBT inclusion seriously should dedicate a fixed amount of time to it, and ensure that positive messages are accompanied by meaningful changes in behavior, rather than processes that can be ignored. If leaders are asking people to bring their whole selves to work, they must also lead by example.

The second thing that leaders can do is identify and celebrate role models. Role models are not examples to emulate but sources of inspiration that teach us something we can apply to our own circumstances. . . . Anybody struggling with a hidden life should take inspiration from these role models, and any leader who wants to create a safe and inclusive environment should celebrate them. They demonstrate that it is possible to come out and succeed.

Change does not happen unless individuals take their careers into their own hands and find the courage to step out of the closet into the true beauty beyond.

Business sometimes clings to the past and lags behind progress in society. But at its best, it is the engine of human progress. From apartheid to the fight against climate change, and from equal pay to equal marriage, business has been at the forefront of social change. Cook’s announcement represents several more bricks in the wall of LGBT acceptance and inclusion, but I am convinced that the best is yet to come.

Lord Browne - Internalized Homophobia at the Highest Levels

For me, a major part of the "coming out" process was letting go of all of the religious and societal brainwashing that I had grown up with that made me perceive being gay as something simply too horrible to contemplate.  Hence the decades of mental gymnastics to convince myself "it wasn't really true" and living constantly on guard and behind a glass wall, if you will, so that no one might discover my terrible secret.  I suffered from internalized homophobia of the highest order.  And it took several years of therapy to get over the damage that had been done to me emotionally and psychologically.  For many of us older gays, the homophobia that we internalized made coming out so, so difficult and painful.  Indeed, I have gay friends who still cannot completely let go of the homophobia they internalized in their youth.  A lengthy article in The Guardian looks at Lord Browne (pictured above), former head of British Petroleum who similarly had to overcome this kind of toxic internalized homophobia.  Browne has now written a book, The Glass Closet, that looks at Browne's experience and why he believes continued homophobia in the business world undermines business productivity. Here are article highlights:

When Lord Browne was in charge of BP, had anyone told him he would one day invite a journalist into his home to discuss his sexuality, he would have said they were insane. Homosexuality was the last thing he expected to talk about in public; after all, he never spoke of it even in private. The former CEO spent half a century in the closet, so terrified of letting his secret slip that he never talked about himself at all, confining his conversational repertoire instead to "the news, and politics, and business. That's what you'd talk about."

But since a Sunday tabloid outed him seven years ago, his life has become a series of unimaginable surprises. For Browne, the revelation has been how much less homophobic the world is than he had always feared. He has now written a book about homosexuality within the business world, and the revelation for many readers will be how homophobic that world still is.

The Glass Closet tells the story of Browne's 38-year career and double life, which began when he joined BP in 1969, and ended with a single phone call from the Mail on Sunday in January 2007, informing him that it was about to publish a kiss'n'tell by a former Brazilian escort, Jeff Chevalier. He had been Browne's first and only boyfriend; the pair met in 2003 on a gay escort website and were together for almost three years. But in public, Browne was a heterosexual bachelor.

His reason for writing The Glass Closet is, he says, quite simple. "I wouldn't want anyone else to go through what I went through."

This motivation to spare others is common among victims of injustice who become campaigners, but it's about the only thing Browne has in common with a typical activist. He lives in a town house on Cheyne Row in Chelsea, where a butler leads me through rooms that could pass for an art gallery and out across a courtyard to a private library purpose-built to hold his antique book collection. A chauffeur-driven Bentley is waiting to whisk him off to the launch of a Matisse exhibition when we have finished.

Browne knew he was gay by the time he left boarding school, and didn't tell a soul. His mother, a Roma Jew, was an Auschwitz survivor and passed to her son an abiding fear that to be different was to invite persecution. "I internalised that to mean being gay was basically wrong, because if you got caught it would be very dangerous."

In Browne's mind, there was no choice. He had to keep his sexuality secret, or his career would be over. "You had to blend in, be chameleon-like, so no one would notice your private life. But you could be noticed in your work life, so you sublimated a lot into that. 

Early in his career, he thought perhaps he could quietly come out once he was further up the ladder. But the higher he climbed, the bigger his public profile grew. In 1995 BP was just a struggling national company, but its new CEO launched a series of audacious takeovers and mergers that turned it into the second largest oil corporation on the planet. Browne became known as "the Sun King", described as Britain's most successful businessman, and almost certainly its most highly paid. 

His devotion to the job left little time for friends. His father, an army officer, had died in 1980; an only child, he was overwhelmed by loneliness when his mother died in 2000. For the first time in his life, aged 52, he risked a relationship with a man.

To anyone of Browne's generation, what happened next may be perfectly recognisable. To anyone under 25, it will sound incomprehensible. When Browne fell in love with Chevalier, he didn't announce their relationship, nor even acknowledge it to his closest friends. The words, "I am gay" had passed his lips only twice in his life, and when Chevalier moved in, Browne didn't even mention his new domestic arrangement to his butler.

Browne thought he was being careful, but now sees it differently. "A friend said, 'Well, of course what you were really doing was daring people to pull you out, and you didn't know you were, but you shouldn't have been surprised when it happened.' And I think, now, that probably the time was coming when what I was doing, and who I was, was becoming unsustainable."  It never occurred to him that Chevalier might betray him.

Seven years on, he still looks stunned by the avalanche of supportive letters and emails that came pouring in, his first intimation that the world might not mind him being gay after all: "It was just amazing." Friends, former colleagues, politicians, journalists and strangers offered support and advice;  . . . .  One of the many strangers who wrote to him was a 32-year-old Vietnamese banker. They met for a drink, fell in love, and have been together since. For the very first time, Browne is one half of a public gay couple.

[T]he simple act of coming out has made him feel like a completely different person.  "The transformation was quite extraordinary for me, because I had to confront who I was, and talk about who I was. I'd never done that before – I always talked about myself just as someone who represented a business. And now I have changed."

Had Browne's story been unique, he would not have written the book. But the statistics indicated to him that the corporate closet must be crowded. British attitudes towards homosexuality have undergone such a sea change in the past 15 years that in many professions – politics, the media – inclusivity is now taken for granted. The less widely reported, more troubling story Browne decided to tell is how little the corporate world has changed.

Only half of all LGBT employees in the US are estimated to be out at work, and in this country a third are estimated to be in the closet.

[I]t is industry leaders who, he hopes, will read his book. He was taken aback by the culture of fear and prejudice he uncovered. Interviewees were offered a guarantee of anonymity, and even then closeted businessmen and women told him they were too frightened to talk.

Homophobia isn't just a problem for gay employees, Browne argues – it's a problem for business. He doesn't concern himself with appeals to morality or equality, but instead keeps hammering home his unshakable conviction that firms that allow their staff to be open and honest are more profitable than companies that make gay employees live a lie. Browne used to think he was doing BP a service by staying in the closet. It was only after he came out that he realised what a colossal waste of energy it had been, and how much more of himself could have been devoted to BP had he been able to be open.

In the book, he quotes a gay businesswoman making the case for introducing a non-discrimination policy to cover sexual orientation. "I want you to go back to your offices," she told her heterosexual bosses. "I want you to remove all vestiges of your family, particularly your spouse. Put the pictures in the drawer and take off your wedding band. You cannot talk about your family, and where you were on vacation. And if your spouse or partner is seriously ill, you are afraid to acknowledge the relationship, because you are afraid you might lose your job. Do all of that – and see how productive you are."

The classic mistake, he says, is to devolve responsibility to an HR department. "HR managers are not CEOs; they're not there to set the tone; the tone has to come from the very top." It's no use simply saying their business is gay-friendly. Chief executives need to give speeches about inclusion, make the diversity officer's role an executive one, create LGBT resource groups and run "allies' programmes", where heterosexual employees sign up to support colleagues who want to come out.

The key, he argues, is to make it easy for gay employees to come out at the beginning of their careers.

I agree with Browne completely on the issue of lost productivity.  Being in the closet at work is exhausting and all the energy and effort expended hiding one's "secret" can be far better used to further the business' interests.   

The Secret of the Seven Sisters - The Cartel That Contols the World's Oil

For newer readers, in my initial years out of law school I worked first for a private law firm that did a huge amount of oil and gas work and later I was in-house counsel for the then largest independent oil company in America out side of the so-called "Seven Sisters" - Exxon, Shell, BP, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf and Chevron - the biggest oil companies in the world.  Hence, I have known the oil industry from the inside - both the good and the bad.  And, despite the rise of OPEC and set backs in some nations where thy saw their assets nationalized, in part often because of poor stewardship, the Seven Sisters (now diminished in numbers due to mergers) still have largely still ended up on top and still wield immense power.   When you hear advertisements lauding the job creation by the oil industry or attack ads against politicians who want to tighten up on the oil industry - often run by the American Petroleum Institute - you are hearing the Seven Sisters at work.  Interestingly  enough,  Al Jazeera is running a four part series on the history of the Seven Sisters and how they continue to control the world's oil supply.  Here are some highlights (go to the article to view a video clip):

On August 28, 1928, in the Scottish highlands, began the secret story of oil.   Three men had an appointment at Achnacarry Castle - a Dutchman, an American and an Englishman.

The Dutchman was Henry Deterding, a man nicknamed the Napoleon of Oil, having exploited a find in Sumatra. He joined forces with a rich ship owner and painted Shell salesman and together the two men founded Royal Dutch Shell.

The American was Walter C. Teagle and he represents the Standard Oil Company, founded by John D. Rockefeller at the age of 31 - the future Exxon. Oil wells, transport, refining and distribution of oil - everything is controlled by Standard oil.

The Englishman, Sir John Cadman, was the director of the Anglo-Persian oil Company, soon to become BP. On the initiative of a young Winston Churchill, the British government had taken a stake in BP and the Royal Navy switched its fuel from coal to oil. With fuel-hungry ships, planes and tanks, oil became "the blood of every battle".

The new automobile industry was developing fast, and the Ford T was selling by the million. The world was thirsty for oil, and companies were waging a merciless contest but the competition was making the market unstable.

That August night, the three men decided to stop fighting and to start sharing out the world's oil. Their vision was that production zones, transport costs, sales prices - everything would be agreed and shared. And so began a great cartel, whose purpose was to dominate the world, by controlling its oil.

Four others soon joined them, and they came to be known as the Seven Sisters - Exxon, Shell, BP, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf and Chevron - the biggest oil companies in the world.

In the first episode, we travel across the Middle East, through both time and space.

"We waged the Iran-Iraq war and I say we waged it, because one country had to be used to destroy the other. As they already benefit from the oil bonanza, and they’re building up financal reserves, from time to time they have to be bled." - Xavier Houzel, an Oil trader

Throughout the region's modern history, since the discovery of oil, the Seven Sisters have sought to control the balance of power.

They have supported monarchies in Iran and Saudi Arabia, opposed the creation of OPEC, profiting from the Iran-Iraq war, leading to the ultimate destruction of Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

The Seven Sisters were always present, and almost always came out on top.  Since that notorious meeting at Achnacarry Castle on August 28, 1928, they have never ceased to plot, to plan and to scheme.

Am I being cynical?  I do not think so.  One need only remember that Dick Cheney's Halliburton before all else was (going back many decades) and is a major oil services corporation totally intertwined with the Seven Sisters.  The America public was played for a bunch of suckers and fools by Messrs Bush and Cheney.

Will Subsidies for the Oil Industry Be the GOP's Next Achilles Heel?

I'm not one to demonize the oil industry in a knee jerk reaction. I was in-house counsel for an oil companies some years back so I do understand the high stakes nature of the industry. Add to that and and I currently own stock in Exxon I recently inherited from my late mother who never sold it (my parents originally owned Mobil stock, which had gay friendly policies which Exxon ended - something I voted to restore on my proxy) because they wanted to allow their heirs to decide what to do with the stock. Nonetheless, obscene greed at some point becomes simply unconscionable. Moreover, not paying one's fair share in taxes is in my view, un-American. Apparently, other voters feel the same way and at town hall meetings the GOP members of Congress are finding themselves under attack for their support of subsidies to the oil industry. That is when they aren't under attack for the GOP plan to kill Medicare for all practical purposes. Think Progress looks at one GOP Congresswoman who has broken ranks and will oppose continued oil industry subsidies. Here are highlights:
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As ThinkProgress has been documenting, conservative lawmakers have been facing the ire of Main Street America at town halls all over the country. These Americans are demanding fair sacrifice rather than budget cuts that unfairly saddle the poor and middle class with the burden of deficit reduction.
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Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA) came face to face with this growing movement at a town hall in Vancouver, Washington last night. Dozens of protesters encamped outside the meeting, waving signs like “Save Medicare: Tax the Rich.” When she tried to defend her vote on the GOP budget that would effectively privatize Medicare, “a chorus of boos and catcalls and shouts of ‘liar’ erupted in the auditorium.”
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Yet at one point — perhaps understanding that her constituents were already upset with her enough — she did endorse a position that put her on the opposite side of most of her House GOP colleagues. She told the audience that she favored ending subsidies to oil companies like Exxon and BP:
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Herrera Beutler did not directly address why she has supported making the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy permanent. But she said she does favor taking a hard look at military spending and supports ending subsidies for big corporations like Exxon and BP.
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Of course, Beutler voted, along with the rest of the House GOP caucus, to protect billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil more than once in the past few months.
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Her flip-flop may be evidence that American anger at Big Oil is forcing hesitant conservatives to switch sides. A number of GOP congressmen have told constituents in recent days that they now oppose the subsidies. These include Reps. Joe Walsh (IL), Tom McClintock (CA), and Dan Webster (FL)

Two Gay Executives Tell Their Stories

One of the blogs I link to is "The Gay Banker," written by a guy in London. In the wake of the Lord Browne resignation from BP, which I posted about previously, the Guardian did an article. The author of the Gay Banker is one of the executives in the Guardian article responding about his life as a gay executive. Here's the link to the Guardian article, that is quite interesting:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2070983,00.html

Sadly, Norfolk, Virginia is light years behind London in its acceptance of gays, much less gay executives and attorneys, although with HRBOR we hope to eventually change this mindset.

Another Self-Inflicted Victim of the Closet

According to 365gay.com (http://www.365gay.com/Newscon07/05/050107bp.htm), the chair of international oil giant British Petroleum has resigned after it emerged he had lied in court during a lawsuit to prevent his former gay lover from doing a tell-all interview with a tabloid. It appears Lord Browne is yet another casualty of trying to lead a double life rather than admit to the world (and perhaps fully to himself) who he really is. I truly long for the day when no one feels the need to hide their sexual orientation and lead much of their life an actor on a stage:

“Lord Browne of Madingley, said to be the most powerful businessman in Britain, tendered his resignation after documents related to the trial were made public by the House of Lords, the UK's highest court. Browne was to have stepped down later this year.

His decision to leave now means he forfeits an estimated $25 million bonus from BP. During his tenure at the oil company he amended the company's worldwide employment policy to add sexuality to the categories protected from on the job harassment.”

I guess the one positive benefit from Lord Browne’s situation was the advancement of a non-discrimination based on sexual orientation policy throughout British Petroleum. It’s sad that he did not feel that he could apply that policy to himself.