Is Trump Good For Businesses? Exxon Mobil To Benefit From Elimination Of Environmental And Financial Regulations By Congress

Former ExxonMobil Corp. Chief Executive Rex Tillerson was sworn in only Wednesday, and already Congress is moving to benefit the new secretary of state’s former—and only—place of work by shredding two major oil industry regulations. Early Friday morning, the Republican-led Senatevoted 52 to 47 on a House resolutionscrapping a Securities and Exchange Commission rule requiring companies like Exxon and Chevron Corp. to disclose payments they make to foreign governments for the ability to extract oil, minerals and natural gas from their territory.

Known as the “extraction rule,” it was meant to curb corruption and boost transparency within the oil industry. Standing before the upper house Thursday night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts railed against the effort to discard the rule.

“One of the Republican Party’s first orders of business is a giveaway to ExxonMobil that will help corrupt and repressive foreign regimes and make it easy to funnel money to terrorists around the world,” she said, adding that companies like Exxon “regularly pay millions” to “corrupt officials” for the rights to drill on their land, and highlighting the “years” necessary to garner bipartisan and even investor support for the law’s passage. “Republicans and Democrats agree that shining a light on these payments would help combat corruption and terrorism around the globe and would help citizens in some of the very poorest nations in the world hold their own governments accountable

Tillerson, she noted, “personally lobbied against” the rule in an attempt to bolster his business interests in Russia.

Next to go, according to a reportreleased Friday by the international environmental organization network Friends of the Earth, is likely an Interior Department rule limiting tax relief for oil companies' losses for natural gas inadvertently burned away or sprayed into the air—a phenomenon known as flaring or venting—on government land.