Voice of the Marketplace: A History of the National Petroleum Council, and: Broken Trusts: The Texas Attorney General versus the Oil Industry, 1889-1909 (review)

Joseph A. Pratt, William H. Becker, and William M. McClenahan, Jr., examine the National Petroleum Council (NPC), a government-chartered but petroleum industry-financed and -staffed advisory council started in 1946 to benefit from and perpetuate the state-business cooperation begun during World War II. As a "forum for the study of energy-related issues," the NPC recruited representatives from vertically integrated oil companies and their independent competitors (p. 4). Its purpose was to formulate objective and "authoritative" reports on topics of interest to federal policymakers, taking into account the forces and conditions that shape "real world markets" and the "supply and demand for energy" (p. 5).

The authors trace chronologically NPC contributions to federal energy policy. Several themes are evident (p. xv). First, government concern over energy preparedness from World War II through the Cold War focus on civil defense required the NPC to look into how well the country could explore for, produce, and distribute petroleum products in wartime conditions or in the aftermath of an atomic attack. As political strife mounted in the Middle East, roughly in step with long-term declines in domestic oil production and increased dependency on imports, the NPC had to offer policymakers an informed opinion on how much "advanced planning" was needed to keep energy supplies flowing in the face of oil supply disruptions (p. 39).

A second theme is the intertwining of petroleum and energy issues with national security, making it difficult for the NPC to perform investigation and reporting while avoiding policy recommendations, a task members traditionally shunned owing to antitrust considerations. Even so, after three years of work the NPC produced U.S. Energy Outlook (1971-72), which projected possible "energy futures" for the United States (p. 77). The council recommended more offshore leasing, favorable tax policies on oil production, "growth of domestic refining," and an end to natural gas price controls (p. 80). President Richard Nixon's administration subsequently proposed policy initiatives in line with these suggestions, but the fall 1973 Arab oil embargo forced new studies, interpretations, and recommendations.

A third theme, crisis management, emerges in chapter 4, wherein the authors tackle the outcome of joining reliable energy supplies with preservation of national security. They point to the hotly debated Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) as an important proposal to decrease U.S. reliance on foreign oil supplies. In a 1974 report entitled "Emergency Preparedness for Interruption of Petroleum Imports into the United States," the NPC supported having an "emergency petroleum reserve," even though much of the petroleum industry had opposed the idea before 1973 (p. 96). It had become clear to the NPC and others concerned with U.S. dependence on oil imports that the notion of national security had to include "economic well-being" (p. 100).

Finally, the NPC played a role in debates over environmental policy. In the aftermath of 1960s fights between beleaguered industries and environmental activists, NPC reports called for "workable standards" that industry could meet on its own terms (p. 123). A 1981 NPC report, Environmental Conservation, advocated increased domestic production of energy supplies and a reexamination of environmental restrictions. In its 1993 report The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA), the NPC argued that proposed regulations of offshore oil production were ill conceived, because very few independent oil producers could afford the insurance to meet the act's "financial requirements" (p. 134). It also campaigned for implementation of an OPA informed by costs rather than emotion or "intense political demands" (p. 139). In...