t r u t h o u t | Energy Firms Help Pay for California Regulators' Far-Flung Trips

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Energy Firms Help Pay for California Regulators' Far-Flung Trips

Sunday 26 July 2009

Sacramento, California - State officials who lead California's war on global warming often travel abroad on trips supported by the major greenhouse gas polluters they regulate, a Bee investigation has found. Industry lobbyists and executives routinely join them.

Since 2006, more than two dozen top state officials have fanned out across the globe on such trips, bound for a climate change policy tour in Europe, meetings with high-level government officials across South America and China, even a safari in Kruger National Park in South Africa - all on someone else's dime.

They have logged more than 700,000 air miles and touched down in 17 nations, on trips collectively costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the process, their air travel alone emitted 275,000 pounds of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Joining them were more than 30 business executives, at least 19 legislators and a handful of spouses and partners.

Information about these trips is not spelled out clearly on any government Web site and there is no coordinated oversight.

The Bee pieced together details from a mountain of state government paperwork that accumulates out of public view, some of it obtained via the California Public Records Act, including memos, itineraries, receipts, office calendars and financial disclosure forms.

Those travel documents indicate that a who's who of climate change oversight in state government - from Linda Adams, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, to Susan Kennedy, chief of staff for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger - mingled abroad with top executives from Chevron, Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas and Electric, Shell Oil, British Petroleum and others.

Industry support for those excursions did not come directly to state officials, the documents show, which would violate a law limiting ...

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http://www.truthout.org/072709F

http://www.truthout.org/072709F