Should ExxonMobil be broken up?
This book review was originally published in the American Prospect, and is republished here with permission.
Even granting that testifying to congressional committees is not on the list of an oil CEO’s favorite things to do, when ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, known to his employees as “Iron Ass,” arrived at the Dirksen Senate Office building one morning in November 2005, he was in an especially reticent mood. Among other things, the Senate Energy Committee wanted to know about the corporation’s role in formulating policy with Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force. Raymond – who was chummy with Cheney and seven weeks away from his retirement, after 12 spectacularly profitable years at the helm first of Exxon and then Exxon-Mobil – did not think the committee needed to know. Thus when New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg asked Raymond whether he or any ExxonMobil executives participated in a 2001 meeting with Cheney, Raymond responded with a single syllable: “No.”
The truth of that statement was something only a lawyer or a comedian could love, but it was consistent with how the company prefers to be seen: independent, apolitical, above the muck of any particular political fight. Yet as Steve Coll documents in his groundbreaking investigation, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, sometimes even the aloof need a little assistance. Just days before the hearing, the company had found itself frustrated with the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which seemed to be stalling on giving ExxonMobil its slice of a hugely valuable 50-billion-barrel oil field. The State Department did not seem to be pressing ExxonMobil’s case as hard as Raymond wanted, so he called Cheney and asked, according to Coll’s paraphrase, “What in the hell is with this country?” Cheney called the UAE government himself, and ExxonMobil got what it wanted.
Coll gained a unique perspective on the history of ExxonMobil’s power from his two-plus decades covering business and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Middle East politics, and national security – early on for The Washington Post, in recent years for The New Yorker, and most notably in Ghost Wars, his book on Afghanistan and the CIA. He approaches the company almost as if reporting on the State Department, finding a sprawling global network led by insular executives often unaware of what is being carried out in their name. At the heart lies a contradiction best illustrated by Raymond’s duplicity. The corporation long ago decided it was best to flex its immense muscle as discreetly as possible, because almost all publicity – whether it’s news of gas prices, climate change, or congressional fights over industry subsidies – is bad.
Indeed, ExxonMobil may have reached the point of being more powerful and entangled than any government. The company’s leaders look at an untapped oil or gas field as a relationship that might last a half-century or more; during that time, politicians and policies will come and go even in settled democracies. Its perspective is so geological, so Olympian, that it has been willing to anger sitting American governments – as in 1997, when Raymond, a Republican, challenged the Democratic administration’s policy with a speech in Beijing urging China’s communist rulers not to sign the Kyoto Protocol climate agreement. At the same time, because so much oil and natural gas is locked up in places with unstable regimes or unsavory leaders – from Equatorial Guinea to Indonesia to Russia – ExxonMobil often finds itself with more power to affect the local society than the best-intentioned State Department functionaries. In a nail-biting chapter on a showdown between the World Bank and the besieged government of Chad, Coll writes that “Exxon-Mobil had made its own choice clear: It was more interested in the survival of Chad’s oil production than it was in the World Bank’s experiment in nation building.”
Private Empire jumps around the globe to illustrate such conflicts, drawing on an impressive array of lawsuits, State Department cables, Freedom of Information Act documents, and interviews with 400 or so subjects, from former executives to tribal leaders who have sued the company. The image that emerges is of some kind of metabolically challenged creature unable to eat enough to sustain its weight. Because its production is so vast, the company is constantly depleting its existing energy supply. It is therefore under intense pressure to appear to book new reserves, to a degree that has encouraged some fudging on the math: For many years, the company would report actual figures to the Securities and Exchange Commission, then issue a press release announcing a bigger amount – a gambit that was technically illegal, though the company doesn’t seem to have ever paid a price (nor is it clear if anyone who matters was fooled).
The company’s culture is almost as strange as the places its engineers now have to go to find oil and gas. Exxon was so shaken by the fallout from the Valdez spill that it adopted safety procedures that sound like the handbook of a paranoid cult. Employees had to back their cars into garage parking spaces, minimizing difficulty if they needed to leave in a hurry. Executives were prohibited from pursuing dangerous behavior even outside the workplace and urged to confess publicly “near misses” they had, from shaky ladders to stones flying out of lawnmowers. Yet all these rituals didn’t keep 24,000 gallons of gas from leaking into the ground in Maryland in 2006, in an area where residents relied on well water, or any of the other countless mishaps that have occurred as part of ExxonMobil’s sprawling operations.
America’s path to alternative energy runs through Brazil
Mitt Romney alone can no longer be saddled with the label of most obvious flip-flopper among this year’s presidential candidates. That honor instead belongs to Barack Obama, whose 180 on the Keystone XL pipeline construction last week was sufficient to induce whiplash among oil industry executives and green advocates alike.
In an effort to actually make good on his “all of the above” energy policy, promoting both fossil fuel and renewable energy, President Obama had no choice but to pull off a neck-twisting reversal. Five months ago he postponed a decision on whether to build a controversial $7 billion pipeline to bring Canadian oil sands fuel down to Texas refineries. But it turns out that was only a temporary sop to the activists who see the structure as both an environmental threat as well as the embodiment of reckless Big Oil greed.
Now, with his opponents falsely equating current high oil prices with Obama’s perceived inaction on domestic energy development, Obama is acting differently. He’s scrambling to counter them by not only reconsidering the earlier postponement but actually accelerating the pipeline’s build as a national priority.
As recently as Mar. 8, Senate Democrats echoed Obama’s early wariness on the pipeline by defeating a Republican bill to fast-track Keystone’s construction. The bill fell short by four votes, no doubt due to Obama’s personal outreach to several senators for their “no” vote, prompting Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to remark: “At a moment when millions are out of work, gas prices are sky-rocketing and the Middle East is in turmoil, we’ve got a president who’s up making phone calls trying to block a pipeline here at home. It’s unbelievable.” After two weeks of damaging poll results, Obama hurried to a photo-op in Cushing, Oklahoma to announce his embrace of the pipeline project.
It would be easy to dismiss such quick U-turns as election year politics-as-usual, but perhaps the truth is that Obama and his advisers finally saw the light on the game-changing potential of North America’s energy opportunities. Within the oil and gas sector, the talk of America becoming energy independent has reached fever pitch since Obama nixed his earlier decision on Keystone. Last week’s Wall Street Journal op-ed by renowned Citigroup energy analyst Ed Morse, “Move Over OPEC – Here We Come,” painted a dramatic picture of a Western hemisphere hydrocarbon revolution based on the current glut of Canadian oil sands crude, American shale gas and Mexican offshore drilling, rendering the Americas as “the new Middle East.”
Statements like that reassure defense observers who see the dangers of foreign oil dependency and encourage multinational fuel corporations. But it’s also the renewable energy companies that stand to benefit. Solar, hydropower, wind and green fuel cell need time to become economically viable and plug into a revised and as-yet-undeveloped smart power grid. A domestic fossil fuel awakening can buy that time.
Brasilia is the power it is today because of Lula’s enlightened leadership. Before Lula its currency regularly crashed, and there was zero safety net for the poor. Today, while far from perfect, there is great hope, the poor are getting some help, and the country is in the best financial condition it has ever seen. We need to understand how intervening to help the general populace, while also practicing financial rectitude can transform a country in a few short years, as it did, magnificently, in Brasil. Instead, we seem to try and follow the neo-con models of Chile and Singapore, where you get either quasi-dictatorship or outright repression. The future is Sweden, Germany and Norway–and Brasil, if it continues on the path of social democracy, looks like it will get there, too. They are the countries whose model works and whose people have the best chance at a healthy, dynamic life–and, neo-con propaganda to the contrary, the best chance for a stable financial future.
Making oil and mining dollars transparent
By Raymond C. Offenheiser The opinions expressed are his own.
For most of us, this July 15th will be the start of just another hot summer weekend. But for many, the day marks the one-year anniversary of Congressional approval of a landmark law that will lift the veil of secrecy on billions of dollars that flow every year from oil and mining companies to governments around the world.
Tucked into the massive Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is a provision requiring oil, gas and mining companies reporting to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to disclose the payments they make to host governments.
From rural villagers in Africa to investors on Wall Street, the groundbreaking law casts the transparency net far and wide, arming the public with information it can use to track the amount of money governments receive from oil and mining companies. The provision, backed by a bipartisan group including Senators Lugar and Cardin, among others, requires annual reporting of taxes, royalties and other payments, and covers a broad range of US, European, Chinese, Brazilian and other companies. By law, the final regulation from the SEC — the regulatory agency responsible for implementing the law — should have been issued in April. However, no final rule has been issued.
One of the reasons for the financial crisis was a lack of public information about the real risks of investments. In the case of the oil and mining industries, investors need to know how and whether companies are exposed to political and expropriation risks in volatile resource-rich countries. In some places, companies can make up front payments of over a billion dollars before a drop of oil is produced and this information is not disclosed to investors. This disclosure provision — in addition to providing useful information to citizens in resource-rich countries — also provides valuable information to investors on how to assess risk. This is part of the SEC’s core mandate. As a display of investor interest, investors representing more than $1.2 trillion in assets under management, including TIAA-CREF and others, have called on the SEC to implement strong rules for this provision.
We at Oxfam America joined NGOs in the Publish What You Pay coalition, faith groups and investors representing over $1.2 trillion in assets to commend the SEC for drafting a regulation in December that followed Congressional intent. Industry and other stakeholders have had plenty of time to comment on the draft — the SEC even extended the comment period.
The time for the SEC to act is now. The world is waiting to follow our lead. The longer the SEC waits, countries such as Ghana, Africa’s newest oil producer, are at risk of falling victim to the resource curse. We’ve seen it happen in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Libya and in mining towns across Latin America, where corrupt government officials squander oil and mineral wealth instead of investing in education, health services and food security.
How about the U.S. doing the something like the U.K. did. Ban corporations, unions, PACS, etc… from contributing to either political parties or candidates for any government office whether elected or appointed. As we are a global economy that prohibition should extend to all foreign interests as well. Paid for political adds should also be prohibited by all except the candidate’s campaign fund. Only voting United States citizens should be able to contribute and those contributions should be limited to a maximum of $1000 dollars in total per election year. The Constitution’s preamble reads “We the People” not “We the Corporations”.
For democracy to work there must be informed consent of the People. Incumbents have a tremendous advantage at raising funds(for political favor?) The House has a better than 90% reelection rate. As long as tens(Senate) or even hundreds of millions(President) or dollars are spent on political campaigns, it is clear to me politicians will say what brings in the money and not the truth as best as they understand it to be.
This is why I believe there is never a serious discussion of the issues our nation faces during election campaigns. Where is the Press in all of this? Perhaps newsrooms should go back to operating not for profit and fulfill their service to the People.
Let them eat oil
By Erik Mielke, who is a partner at Namir Capital Management LLC, a New York-based investment management firm that invests in emerging markets. The opinions expressed are his own.
The winds of change are forcing fundamental political and economic shifts across the Arab world. But one area of economic reform is likely to be brought to a stop as regimes respond to popular protests with populist measures. These initiatives include extending and expanding the region’s massive energy-price subsidies. For the rest of the world, this matters tremendously. One additional barrel consumed in Tehran or Riyadh is effectively one less barrel for the export market, and that means higher global oil prices.
Fueled by petrodollars and subsidized oil, energy consumption has been rising rapidly throughout the region. In the 10-year period to 2009, oil consumption in Middle East and North Africa rose by 50%, or 2.7 million barrels per day, second only to China’s rate of growth. In the same period, the region’s oil production only rose by 2.5 million barrels per day. The net result was a decline in oil exports from the world’s key producers.
Current energy subsidies are huge. The International Energy Agency’s most recent estimate for global fossil-fuel subsidies was $312 billion in 2009. That number is likely significantly higher in 2010, as the market price for oil rose by nearly one-third, and will be even higher still in 2011 (at the recent peak in oil prices in 2008, global subsidies reached a staggering $558 billion). Iranian subsidies, alone, amounted to $66 billion in 2009, a budget-busting 20% of the country’s GDP, with Saudi Arabia and Russia in second and third place with $35 billion and $34 billion, respectively.
In an attempt to placate protestors, regimes across the region have now increased these handouts and subsidies. Most of the initiatives have a one-year window, but will likely remain in place for much longer in some countries.
In Kuwait, the government announced in January a 1,000 dinar (approximately $3,600) cash windfall to each citizen and free food staples until March 2013 (these measures do not apply to the foreign workers who make up two-thirds of the population). Similar measures have been introduced in Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia in the last two months.
Will oil prices stabilize around $80?
Most commentators and oil analysts are convinced a further rise in prices is inevitable in the next few years as emerging market consumption grows and supplies increasingly come from more costly and technically challenging sources such as ultra-deepwater.
While there are disagreements about the extent and the timing of price changes, there is a remarkable degree of consensus about the direction: up. But the roller-coaster experience of the last five years should have taught forecasters to be much more cautious about extrapolating trends and assuming the future direction is obvious.
Price forecasts are notoriously unreliable. There are simply too many variables and too much uncertainty about the current state of the market let alone how supply and demand will evolve in future. The crucial role of expectations in price formation adds an element to “reflexivity” which is hard for forecasters to anticipate or model accurately.
Reflexivity is a concept attributed to billionaire financier George Soros, in which perceptions of market direction and market fundamentals influence one another.
Forecasters’ confidence prices can only increase in future seems misplaced. On closer inspection, many of the factors which make price rises seem inevitable are flawed or unpersuasive. At present there are no fundamental reasons oil prices must increase above the current level of around $80 per barrel in real terms (once inflation and exchange rate changes are taken into account). Nor is there any reason to expect a spike in prices similar to 2008.
Prices have remained stable in a relatively narrow range of $65-85 for more than 12 months. While prices are unlikely to stay at this level forever, there is no compelling reason to expect the next move to be higher than lower, or for the current trading range to break down in the short to medium term. Risks to the outlook appear balanced, as they should be if the market is discounting expectations properly.
SHORT-TERM OUTLOOK In its November Oil Market Report (OMR), the International Energy Agency (IEA) attributed the spike in late 2007 and the first half of 2008 to a combination of factors — including strong demand growth; constrained supply; tight spare capacity; and a mismatch between crude oil supply, refining capacity and product specifications; as well as fears about peak oil and growing interest in commodities as an asset class.
Hei,
I am very interested in Energy Trading ( Crude, Natural gas, etc). Also want to make a career out of this. Please do recommend the course of action i must pursue. I will really appreciate your help.
Thanks
NESSE
Forecasting and its discontents
“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future,” is attributed to a long list of people. Even with that in mind, however, the first eight months of 2010 have been especially unkind to professional forecasters and investors as markets have lurched between extremes of pessimism and optimism.
Normally forecasters can benefit from diversification — publishing lots of forecasts ensures at least some prove correct. But heightened correlation between and within asset classes has denied forecasters and investors even that consolation.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has complained about the “unusual uncertainty” clouding the outlook. And macro hedge funds have run into trouble, several prominent ones closing down and returning money to investors, as the big trends on which they thrive have disappeared amid volatility and sharp switchbacks.
The only clear trend has been the rush towards the safety of high-rated government bonds and corporate debt. Even that has some observers muttering darkly about irrationality and the probability of a bubble, implying a big reversal in future.
In that context, it is hardly surprising oil price predictions have come unstuck.
The median forecast for average U.S. crude oil prices in 2010 increased steadily from $74.00 per barrel in the first Reuters survey in October 2009 to $81.06 at the time of the April 2010 survey, before sliding in each of the next four months to a low of $78.63 in August. Further reductions seem likely when the next survey is published in September.
While the adjustments may not seem large, these are averages. Changes in individual predictions have been far larger in some cases.
Speculators abandon oil for the moment
Bullishness about the short-term prospects for crude is evaporating among banks and hedge funds, as the market fails to sustain rallies above $80 and girds for widespread refinery shutdowns to work off bulging gasoline stocks.
The urge to buy on the dips, trade the range and hope for a breakout seems to be fading. Banks and other swap dealers boosted their net long position in WTI-linked futures and options by a meagre 7,000 contracts to just 22,000 in the week to Aug. 17, even as prices tumbled from over $80 to around $75.
The last time the market pulled back this far, swap dealers were carrying a net long position of 65-75,000 contracts, according to data published by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Money managers actually cut their net long position 16 percent from 151,000 contracts to just 127,000. While the position is still double the early July lows, it is less than half the 244,000 contracts reported at the start of April.
Significantly, hedge funds increased their short positions, even as prices fell, the first big increase in almost two months, indicating increased bearishness.
TABLE: http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/ce/COT-TABLE.pdf CHART 1: http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/ce/COTNET1.pdf CHART 2: http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/ce/COTNET2.pdf CHART 3: http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/ce/COTNET3.pdf
In a sign many market participants are now convinced range-trading will continue, with less likelihood of an upside breakout, and perhaps with a bearish bias, the total number of contracts remaining open fell 2.6 percent to 4.124 million, the lowest since July 20 and before that Feb. 23 (Chart 4).
Micro and macro volatility in the oil market
- John Kemp is a Reuters market analyst. The views expressed are his own –
“Most probably we will continue to have reasonably high short-term volatility but in a narrower price range between $60-95 per barrel”. That was the (accurate) forecast for crude oil prices given by Mercuria’s head of trading Daniel Jaeggi to the UN Commodities Forum in Geneva back in March [ID:nLDE62M0MT]. In fact front-month futures <CLc1> have been trapped in an even narrower range of $60-86 for the past 12 months, shrinking to $64-86 so far in 2010. Spot prices have barely budged since July last year, despite a substantial improvement in demand, as one puzzled investment bank noted recently. Yet many traders complain high volatility is making either directional or technical strategies difficult to implement. The apparent contradiction (high levels of very short-term price movement in a market trending sideways) highlights the different levels of volatility prevailing at different time horizons.
PICK YOUR HORIZON Standard measures of volatility take price changes from the close of one business day to the next, averaged over the last 20 or 30 trading days, and then adjust them to an annualised rate. On this basis, oil price volatility has been unusually low in H1 2010. Close-to-close volatility hit a 2.5 year trough of 19 percent in March. Volatility increased as the rally broke down, peaking at almost 40.5 percent in late May and early June. But even that was low compared with peaks of more than 50 percent or 60 percent during previous periods of elevated volatility. Close-to-close volatility is now back to just 28 percent, putting it in the 30th percentile of the distribution for all periods since the start of 2005. But over other time horizons, volatility looks very different (http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/ce/VOL-HRZN.pdf). Intra-day volatility is higher compared with past periods. The real measure of intra-day volatility would take 5-minute or even 1-minute price changes over an hour or a day and annualise them. In practice that is too data-intensive for anyone not undertaking a full modelling exercise. But the daily trading range (high-low) is a reasonable if rough proxy. Intra-day volatility (based on the high-low trading range) is currently running around 15 percent per year. While that is low compared with the close-to-close measure (28 percent) it is quite high compared with previous periods. Intra-day volatility is currently in the 40th percentile (compared with the 30th for close-to-close volatility). Moreover, intra-day volatility peaked at the 90th percentile back in late May, compared with a peak in the 81st for daily volatility at the same time. Traders who complain about large intra-day price swings are not imagining it; the market really is exhibiting unusually wide daily trading ranges at present. Weekly volatility (measured from the close of business on one Friday to the next) is even more elevated compared with past periods. On a week-to-week basis, volatility is currently running at just over 41 percent, putting it in the 75th percentile of the distribution since the start of 2005.
TELLING A STORY The challenge is to find a “narrative” explaining high levels of volatility at intra-day and weekly levels, yet comparatively low levels of volatility at the daily and yearly ones. As former Federal Reserve Governor Lawrence Meyer remarked “When I’m asked what my profession was prior to joining the Board of Governors, I do not say that I was an economic forecaster, but rather a storyteller. As a forecaster, I had learned that neither my students nor my clients wanted to be buried in reams of computer output. They wanted me to tell a story that brought together in a coherent way the implications of the large numbers of economic indicators they saw as otherwise unconnected and therefore confusing”. So can we attempt a “story” to explain different oil market volatility at different time horizons over the past 12 months? Overall the market appears to have found a balance between bullish and bearish forces in recent weeks and months — which might mark an equilibrium (my view), an “uneasy truce” (the International Energy Agency’s view, expressed in its Medium Term Oil and Gas Markets Outlook) or a “state of disequilibrium” (Barclays Capital Commodity Refiner, Autumn 2010, page 62). However this state is defined, it accounts for the broad sideways trend in prices over the past 9-12 months in a fairly narrow range of $70-80 or $65-85 per barrel, and the relatively low level of volatility over longer horizons. But as the market has fluctuated between extremes or poles of euphoria and despair, prices show large week-to-week variations within the band. The price has “cycled” between the high end of the range and the low one, accounting for the high level of volatility at intermediate horizons such as the weekly level.
DAY TRADING AND HFT Over shorter horizons, the market has been unusually stable at the daily level but much more variable at an intra-day level. One explanation focuses on increased presence of day traders and high-frequency or algorithmic traders in the market. There is no reliable public data on how much of the daily trading volume in crude oil futures and options is accounted for by day traders or high-frequency traders (HFTs). CME Group (which operates NYMEX) has conducted internal studies assessing the impact of HFT volume on volatility in various futures contracts, including oil. The results were briefly cited in CME’s presentation to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)’s Technology Advisory Committee (TAC) last week, but have not been published. The CFTC itself does not appear to have reliable numbers on HFT let alone day trading volumes. But HFT volumes already account for around 50 percent of all trading in some equity markets, and there is clear evidence the strategy is increasingly being applied to commodity markets. The point about HFT and day trading is that most positions are held for an extremely short term. In most cases, positions are not carried overnight and must be closed before the end of the session. Could an increase in HFT and day trading be increasing intra-day price movements, while also dampening close-to-close movements, since HFT and day trades are normally reversed by the time the market closes? CME Group insists HFT has dampened volatility by boosting liquidity, and cites unpublished internal studies to reinforce the point. But the answer is we don’t know because there is not sufficient information on HFT and day-trading volumes in the public domain. It might become clearer if the CFTC obliges exchanges to make more data available as part of the TAC review. However, heightened activity among traders taking a very short term (sub-24 hours) view on the direction of oil prices and spreads, and using low-latency technology to arbitrage between oil and equity markets, would be consistent with the observed increase in intra-day price movement while close-to-close movement remains limited.
fairly realistic analysis.how do u see oil in next 5-10 years.in my view i see it trading between 15-25$.
The darkest period before dawn?
Abandon hope all ye who enter here was the inscription written above the gates of Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Investors who decided to take a long position in commodity futures at the start of 2010 anticipating a global recovery, tightening supply-demand balances, and rising prices, could be forgiven a sense of despair.
Their risk-taking has been rewarded with range-bound prices and a contango eating deeply into returns. Most longs lost money in H1 2010.
Flagship U.S. oil prices have moved sideways for the last 12 months, while negative contango rolls ensured investors lost around 13 percent since the start of the year.
The problem is not confined to WTI, which has been likened by some analysts to a “chocolate teapot” because of its sensitivity to inventories around the delivery point at Cushing. An investment in Brent futures, which reflects the seaborne international oil market more faithfully, according to analysts, is down just over 9 percent on a total return basis.
Oil is not the only commodity which has underperformed in H1. The Standard and Poor’s Goldman Sachs Non-Energy Index has produced negative returns of 8.5 percent so far this year.
So many wasted words for such a simple investing issue: when volatility goes up, one should invest short; when the volatility drops off, then go long. If these ‘investors’ got burned by holding on to beliefs instead of re-examining their holdings as new data came in then they deserve to get burned. Caveat Emptor pal
from The Great Debate UK:
Facebook group defends “harassed” BP
BP’s chief executive Tony Hayward branded “the most hated man in America” may be surprised to find himself cast in the role of victim by a growing clan of web-based supporters on Facebook.
One such group ‘Support BP’ calls itself the defender of an “undeservedly harassed institution” and seeks to show that the public opprobrium BP faces over its now 60-day-old Gulf of Mexico oil spill is not universal.
Members have been increasingly vocal since a succession of strong rebukes of BP by U.S. President Obama and lawmakers at Thursday’s congressional hearing, which they are calling a “lynch mob”.
The outburst of sympathy follows an apology to Hayward from Texas Republican Representative Joe Barton on Thursday, later withdrawn, for having to agree to a deal with President Obama to set up a $20 billion fund for Gulf claim damages.
Some of the Facebook posts echoed this same spirit of regret: “My apologies as an American to Tony Hayward for the rude and insulting conduct as well as the rush to judgement by U.S. politicians on 16/7,” wrote George Gray, 50, from Pennsylvania, referring to Thursday’s hearing.
The bulk of the group’s posts are written by Americans.
