How Management Consultancies “Data Wash” for the Fossil Fuel Industry

[00:00:00] Amy Westervelt: Hello and welcome back to Drilled, I'm Amy Westervelt. We are running a new series right now in both the podcast and on our website at drilled. media focused on what we've been calling false solutions. These are really new climate problems masquerading as solutions, things that the fossil fuel industry has suggested as ways to decarbonize, but that actually just lock us into more fossil fuel development for the next several decades.

I'm talking about things like liquefied natural gas, carbon capture, hydrogen, renewable natural gas. There's a whole host of these technologies and new products that are being sold to both U. S. and European and Asian consumers as quote unquote green when actually they come with ever more greenhouse gas emissions.

We've already put one story out about a fossil fuel lobbying group that's trying to rebrand, liquefied natural gas as a clean, low, or even zero carbon fuel, go check that out on our website. We'll have a corresponding podcast episode about the LNG boom in the next week or so. In the meantime, today we're talking about something that's really insidious and that it's kind of hard to cover because it gets into the weeds a little bit.

And that is the role that management consultancies play in all of this. They have mostly been flying under the radar where disinformation and false solutions is concerned, but they play a really important role in shaping information and data and giving the industry sort of the credible bent to its proposed solutions.

And they do that by providing data and analysis and technical reports to industry groups and companies. The catch is that the data is highly limited by parameters that the companies and industry groups set. So while the consultancy is doing a rigorous analysis, it's also being asked to leave out some pretty key components of that analysis.

This allows them to sort of hold up their hands and say, Hey, we did the data and analysis. They asked us for, you know, that's, that's our contribution. We, we aren't the ones that are saying that that justifies this, that and the other, but really that's kind of a cop out because of course these reports are then being used to lobby for particular policies or to convince people that, you know, energy transition is going to be too expensive, all those kinds of things.

A UN group called Race to Zero is actually starting to look at these kinds of things in a more serious way. So they're looking at professional services providers, PSPs, and they're including management consultancies in that as well as PR and advertising firms, which of course we've looked at a lot over here at Drilled.

Several months ago, a former employee from a management consultancy reached out to me with some information about how that firm was approaching its fossil fuel clients. This happens to be a firm that also does quite a bit of work for the U. S. government on really robust climate analysis. And there's a reason that the industry also goes to them because they know that the government trusts their technical analysis.

So again, it's just not as innocent as a lot of consultancies would like to make it out as. I asked reporter Maddie Stone to look into those leads and she did and she found a lot. So she is here today to talk me through what she found and why it's important to look at these things. You can also find a written version of that story on our website at drilled.

media. After the break, Maddie Stone on management consultancies.

[00:04:08] Maddie Stone: Hi, I'm Maddie Stone. I'm a freelance journalist covering climate change, energy transition, and lots of related topics.

[00:04:16] Amy Westervelt: Okay, Maddie, we asked you to look into this particular management consultant for this story. Can you tell us a little bit about who they are and what they do?

[00:04:29] Maddie Stone: Yes, so the management consultant I've been looking into is called ICF.

They are a multinational consulting firm that works in a variety of different sectors, providing data and analysis to government regulators, and private industry clients. But one of their biggest practices is climate and energy. And so they have more than 2000 people employed across their climate practice, which does a lot of work with the US federal government, as well as state governments and local governments around the country.

Including a lot of really legitimate and sort of respected work, studying decarbonization pathways that cities, states and governments can use helping to implement energy efficiency programs for municipalities as well as utilities and even helping to do the analysis underpinning some really high level and influential Climate documents ICF contractors have helped to author and coordinate several recent installments of the National Climate Assessment, which is this very authoritative federal government report that comes out every few years on how climate change is impacting the U. S. So, that is Sort of the climate and energy work that ICF likes to present to the world. However, what my investigation found is that the firm is also hired by industry groups like the American Petroleum Institute and the American Gas Association. These are fossil fuel lobby groups that want to maintain the fossil fuel centric status quo.

Mm hmm. And they hire this respected. So called objective energy and climate consultancy to produce reports for them that they have a hand in shaping, they can tell the consultancy, we want you to model this and that and don't model this and that, and the end result is these very technical, official looking reports produced by this This credible consultancy that the industry ultimately uses to promote itself and its positions, namely that we should continue using gas and other fossil fuels and that decarbonization strategies should embrace it.

It's the potential for things like fossil gas and industry preferred solutions. And it's it's a really sort of tricky issue that you have this very highly regarded climate consultancy best known for work on decarbonization and actually tackling climate change that has an albeit. Seemingly fairly small part of its business devoted to producing reports that are then used by fossil fuel industry interests, lobby groups.

[00:07:39] Amy Westervelt: Yeah. And you spoke with Julie McNamara at the Union of Concerned Scientists, right, about this. I, I thought what she had to say was really interesting because I think people tend to think of anything that's modeled as being objective in some way. Like if it has a chart, then it's objective, you know?

[00:07:57] Maddie Stone: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And Julie McNamara is someone who It has a lot of technical expertise on climate and energy modeling. She herself has worked for a, organization that did government contracted analysis work, not too dissimilar from ICF, is familiar with their work. And yeah, she, she was kind of able to help me understand what exactly It is that makes this so sort of tricky and nefarious what consultancies like ICF are doing when they work with fossil fuel industry groups.

[00:08:34] Julie McNamara: We're in a in an era where it's clear that climate change is happening and that fossil fuel is the cause, right? That we need to transition away from our current practices processes that are all reliant on the fossil fuel industry.

The fossil fuel industry has responded with every single possible way to delay and distract action. And these types of technical analyses allow the fossil fuel industry to hold up the report in one hand and say, no, look, we're, we're working on it. We have answers while continuing to solidify policy outcomes that perpetuate investments in fossil fuel infrastructure today.

So, those technical reports, they just buy time, right? , they are absolutely a greenwashing mechanism to say, we're not ignoring the problem. We're not saying it's not here. We have a plan. And at the same time, doing absolutely nothing to prove out whether that plan would ever be viable, would ever be in the public interest, and is even something they would ever be actually working towards.

The question becomes, who is running those models? How are they being shaped? What are the questions being asked and what are the assumptions being entered? Because. It is absolutely the case that analyses are only as good as the questions being asked and the assumptions being employed.

Models can be so readily co opted to justify favored results. They can also be readily deployed for rigorous, extremely helpful and insightful analyses. The difference comes in who is doing the work and who is overseeing that selection process. And to me, that's one of the most insidious things about an organization that simultaneously use even the exact same model, but to use it for fossil fuel lobby groups on the one hand, and state policy implementation on the other, because it muddies the water of what's real and what's not, what's rigorous and what's not, because the model doesn't change, the assumptions that are used do.

But. Suddenly, right, this organization that can be seen as doing very rigorous work puts its analytical stamp on a set of questions and a set of assumptions put forward by the fossil fuel lobby. And that is a fundamentally different outcome than something being informed through a rigorous public stakeholder process like one might see at the state level.

[00:11:07] Maddie Stone: What they're doing is they're supplying a model, and in many cases, it's a perfectly legitimate model that might also be used by the Department of Energy or the EPA to do perfectly legitimate climate and energy modeling.

But when they go to an industry client like the American Gas Association, for example, that client might tell them, okay, only use this model to study XYZ and ignore XYZ other scenarios. Right. And so, , for example, ICF, provided the analysis is how they put it behind a 2021 American Gas Association report, looking at Various decarbonization pathways that the gas industry could follow.

And so this was a report specifically set up by the gas industry to demonstrate how it could zero out its carbon emissions. So the underlying assumption there That the client came to ICF with was we can be part of the climate solution and a big part of the climate solution and here are all these very technical, rigorous, you know, science backed data points showing how we can eliminate our carbon emissions by the same consultancy that, you know, you guys in the government use exactly exactly.

Yeah, but. You know, what's left unsaid there is everything that is excluded from the model. So, for example, an economic comparison of what it's going to cost to implement all these gas industry preferred solutions versus simply switching to renewable energy and electrifying buildings. And, you know, there are other things that might go into that model that the gas industry wants to put in, for example, not saying this went into this specific case, but maybe a gas industry client would come to a consultancy with some numbers around the cost of electrification.

Right. And maybe those numbers are considered unrealistic today, but those are the numbers that the industry wanted to use to run its models. And then as a result, you get a report. That has some conclusions that appear to favor gas over electrification.

[00:13:31] Amy Westervelt: Right. Right. And so. And the consultancies kind of go, Oh, well, we just provided the data that they asked for.

[00:13:36] Maddie Stone: Exactly. So the consultancy can say, you know, we just did this objective science based analysis. We don't take any policy or advocacy positions based on it. Right. But what makes that so problematic in a way is that it's allowing the. Industry groups to take this white paper and say, this is a completely objective third party analysis, you know, that supports all of our preferred policy positions.

And that's It's only true on this very, you know, surface level where you're not considering all the ways that the industry might have informed or shaped or restricted how that analysis was done.

[00:14:22] Amy Westervelt: Yeah. That's, it's super interesting. We we interviewed Ben Franta a couple of years ago when he had this paper out that was called Weaponizing Economics.

I don't know if you, if you read that paper, but he, he talked to an economist who worked for a firm called Charles River. And they were contracted by the API, like, I want to say in the 90s, early 90s, to run economic models that would show that the cost of acting on climate change was like, just way too expensive and not realistic.

And they left out the cost of not acting on climate change. And so like, Ben found this economist who'd been part of that work who said, you know, we did rigorous analysis of the stuff that we were like told to look at, but I regret that, you know, we went along with this thing of like not including this other scenario, which is clearly important for policymakers to understand.

And that model got used. for years to justify. No, no, no. We shouldn't be doing anything. Look at how expensive it is and all of that stuff. So, I know ICF kind of came back to you and said, look, this is a very small part of our business. And and that's, that's true. quite a common response, I think, in these kinds of cases.

But I know you also talked to some people who have seen this ICF report for the AGA, for example, or the API, be cited kind of every time policy debates come up about this. So, yeah, I'm, I'd like to, I'd love to have you kind of talk about that, like how much, I guess, like how much this stuff gets leaned on in these policy conversations.

[00:16:04] Maddie Stone: The sense I have is that certain reports ICF has authored for certain fossil fuel interest groups have been leaned on a lot in recent years. That 2021 American Gas Association report sort of being a very prominent example of that. I spoke with some folks at the Climate Change Think Tank Influence Map who have been closely tracking the gas industry's influence in policy debates over things like building decarbonization and electrification and even gas stove debates in recent years.

And they told me they've seen this AGA. slash ICF report come up over and over again in formal comments submitted on rulemakings to various agencies in letters to business leaders and politicians and basically every context you can imagine where the American Gas Association wants to point out to influential Politicians or regulators or folks in the business world that, hey, look, there's a way for the gas industry to be part of the future, even a decarbonized future.

And we don't actually have to do all of this complicated and in their view, costly, you know, switching to electrification because we have this analysis showing all the ways that we can decarbonize gas. Right. So it's really become a powerful tool for them in helping to bolster their own credibility and influence and shape policy conversations.

The really tricky part about that is how then do you quantify. That impact. Right. You know, it's like, It's a hard thing to put a carbon amount on. ICF, one of their specialties as a consultancy is carbon accounting, and they love to point out all of the emissions reductions associated with the work they do with the EPA for its energy efficiency programs and with utilities to implement energy efficiency programs, all the millions of tons of carbon they're saving per year.

But what is the climate impact associated with producing a report that an influential gas industry trade group can then use to block decarbonization policies?

[00:18:27] Amy Westervelt: Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, that would be really interesting to study actually.

[00:18:31] Maddie Stone: It's a hard thing to study and it's allowed consultancies like ICF to sort of exist in this gray space of You know, we are just these objective information providers, these data analysts who can crunch numbers and will provide that service to anybody, but we're not going to take a position positions.

We're not going to. You know, say policymakers should do X, Y, and Z based on the results of this work. Yeah, but they will say, you know, like we're a climate leader or we're, you know, helping to decarbonize. And yeah, so the positive, you know, the aspects of the work that are Positive for climate, of which I should emphasize, again, this firm does a lot of good climate work are, are things that ICF really likes to tout.

Yeah. And as you pointed out a moment ago, they emphasize to me that the work for fossil fuel trade organizations is a small part of their practice in terms of, in terms of their revenue. But again, I think it's an open question as to what the overall. Climate impact of that work is, yeah. Even if it's just a few reports every couple of years.

Mm-Hmm. , if those reports can be used to delay or block important electrification measures in cities or states across the country, like that could have a big ripple effect.

[00:19:58] Amy Westervelt: Yeah. And to lend credibility to, you know, kind of industry preferred solutions and all of that kind of stuff too. And, you know. I always, whenever companies or agencies or consultancies are like, it's only a small part of our work.

My immediate thought is like, then why do it at all, especially if like, you know, you spend a significant amount of your time.

[00:20:21] Maddie Stone: Yeah. It's a really interesting question. You know, why, why do that? Why not just decide you're going to draw a line in the sand with certain types of projects or certain types of clients?

[00:20:39] Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I want to, on that note, I want to ask you about that. There was one thing that they that they worked on that made me laugh out loud. And that was the, the idea that, you know, a gallon of oil from the Gulf of Mexico is like lower carbon than, you know, other places.

[00:20:56] Maddie Stone: Right. Yeah. That was a really interesting finding and report. So, ICF was hired by the National Ocean Industries Association several years back. This is a trade organization that largely represents oil and gas producers and affiliated industries and interests offshore, offshore producers. Correct. So a lot of oil and gas producers who have assets in the Gulf of Mexico and who want to, you know, build more wells and drill more oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

So this organization hired ICF to produce a report that looked at a very narrow technical question of what are effectively the emissions associated with with producing a barrel of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. They also, I should add, looked at the United States as a whole. So they looked at, you know, land based oil and gas production, and they also looked specifically at the Gulf.

And then they created this huge database of data points for addressing the same question elsewhere around the world. So what are the emissions associated with producing a barrel of oil in this part of the Middle East or, you know, offshore in the Baltic Sea? So they looked at all these different regions around the world and ultimately concluded that the emissions associated with producing a barrel of oil in the Gulf are relatively low compared with most other parts of the world.

I keep emphasizing the word producing because the emissions that they looked at are the emissions that come along with literally pulling the oil out of the ground and packaging it up.

[00:22:40] Amy Westervelt: Yeah. So not distribution, not burning it. Right. So we're talking like maximum eight to 10 percent of a company's emissions.

Like a small percent.

[00:22:49] Maddie Stone: Yeah. These are what would be called in greenhouse gas reporting. lingo, the scope one and scope two emissions. Yeah. So. And not even all of scope two. Not even all of scope two. So the downstream scope three emissions, aka the vast majority of emissions associated with fossil fuel products, the actual burning of that oil and gas are not something that we're considered here.

Yeah. So. Again, ICF was contracted to do what was probably a totally solid technical analysis looking at this narrow technical question, and then with this report in hand this Oil and Gas Industry Trade Association put out press releases and blog posts saying, look how much climate friendlier oil production in the Gulf of Mexico is compared with all over the world.

And wouldn't it be great if America produced more oil in the Gulf of Mexico? Isn't that a great idea both for our economy and the climate?

[00:23:47] Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Yeah. That's so interesting we've been looking at LNG producers in the U. S. too. And one of them EQT. Yeah. commissioned a very similar type of report from McKinsey that shows, you know, that U. S. LNG in particular is a, you know, climate solution because, yeah, these production emissions are lower and then, you know, I don't know, the location and the way we get it and all of this kind of stuff. And because, you know, they all love to say that. Right. And there, again, McKinsey was sort of like, we just supplied the data and the, you know, technical analysis.

We didn't come to any conclusions or write this report or, you know, yeah.

[00:24:37] Maddie Stone: Exactly. Yeah. And that's, that's exactly what happened here. And this report in particular was like pounced on by Republican Congress people who are advocating for, you know, more oil and gas production in the Gulf. I think I saw the American Petroleum Institute cite it in a press release on a lawsuit.

It was launching against the Biden administration for essentially not Not permitting more oil and gas drilling to occur in the Gulf of Mexico. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's It's, it's worked its way into the, into the conversation. Yeah. Yeah. That's, I didn't even think about the litigation piece, but yeah, that kind of stuff absolutely gets pointed to as sort of evidence in those kinds of situations too.

[00:25:25] Amy Westervelt: Yeah. That's interesting. Totally. Okay. Tell me about the Race to Zero and how they're looking at these kinds of firms.

[00:25:33] Maddie Stone: Yeah. Race to Zero is a UN associated initiative. It's It's sort of a coalition of businesses and university leaders and members of civil society who are trying to come up with decarbonization strategies for various Sectors of society that align with the Paris agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1. 5 degrees and there is a new race to zero initiative to develop a set of effectively a set of best practice guidelines for professional service providers, including consultancies and ad agencies and law firms. To adhere to. So the reason Race to Zero is now focusing on professional service providers like consultancies is because It's exactly because they're in this unique position of having influence and of not necessarily having a large carbon footprint on their own.

When you think about what is the carbon footprint of a consultancy like ICF? Well, they use energy to keep the lights on in their office space. You know, maybe they're you know, driving to work. It's, it's, it's relatively You know, small potatoes types things. They're not running huge industrial facilities that are creating a lot of pollution, right?

What they are doing is they're working with clients who run huge industrial facilities that create a lot of pollution and the advice that they provide to those clients or the types of technical analysis they do has these downstream ripple effects on really like the entire economy. And race to zero's contention here is that those ripple effects and the emissions associated with them are likely to be a lot greater than the emissions that a firm like ICF can kind of claim as like their own claim, as their own emissions.

So we're talking emissions that are even a little bit beyond the scope. 1, 2, 3, sort of standard. Reporting framework. This is indirect emissions associated with giving advice. So if you tell you know, a utility, it's going to cost you this amount of money to decarbonize and the utility looks at that number and goes, Oh, we're not going to do that.

You know? Right. Right. That has a climate impact. Yeah. And, or if a report is used for lobbying successfully, then that has a climate impact too. And these, these impacts can be both positive and negative. What race to zero is saying is that PSPs need to account for them when they're, Attempting to account for their own climate impact, and here are some best practices you can follow if you want to drive down emissions and climate impact throughout your practice, such as maybe taking a hard look at your entire client base and what sorts of projects you're working on for them and the climate impact of those projects and making some high level corporate decisions about the types of work you will continue to do if you want to align your practice with a decarbonized Yeah.

Yeah. I feel like another place that this shows up a lot is in the sort of support of false solutions kind of realm. And I know we've been talking about doing like a follow on story, because there's so much around ICF and other consultancies work supporting The idea of renewable natural gas as a climate solution, but just give us like a little tease of what what exactly are the sorts of things that that they're doing to, to just like, I don't know, kind of like provide the evidence base for this being a good idea.

Yeah. Yeah. So ICF is contracted by both utilities. government agencies to look at certain climate solutions, quote unquote that the gas industry is really heavily promoting and pushing for. So chief among those being this idea of renewable natural gas, or RNG, which is essentially. Methane gas that was produced from a biological source.

So maybe it's gas escaping from landfills during decomposition. Or maybe it's methane that is synthetically manufactured by taking crop residues and subjecting them to a gas production process. It's this umbrella term that can refer to a lot of different things, but it's effectively, methane gas that can be a drop in replacement for fossil gas.

And what, there's a lot of debate and controversy to put it mildly around how much of a climate solution this can actually be. But to the gas industry, it's like, It's this amazing thing that allows them to effectively do nothing to change their infrastructure or their operations. They just need to partner with companies that can supply and produce a lot of this RNG.

And using some tricky and, again, very controversial math, can claim that they've cancelled out most of their emissions on paper. Yeah. Yeah. And and yeah, so what is, what is ICF done in this realm? Yeah, so ICF has again, worked with utilities and government agencies to produce reports looking at overall potential for RNG in certain scenarios.

So they were contracted in 2019 by the American Gas Foundation, another gas industry trade association, not to be confused with the HEA to look at RNG production potential nationwide. So they looked at all these different possible sources of RNG from cow manure to methane to synthetic production of RNG from energy crops and forest residues.

And effectively summing all those sources up for every state in the country, found that there's this huge potential supply, potential supply of RNG out there. This is, I want to be very clear, doesn't really exist today. Right. This is an industry that is like largely On paper at this point, but effectively.

I think the top line conclusion of that report was that 95 percent of residential natural gas usage could be replaced with RNG. Wow. Which is huge. That's huge. But it's also like a massively more than what I've seen. It's like actually realistic. It's massively more than what any like reasonable independent scientist would say.

Studying this, we'll say, is realistic. And that was the whole point, I think, of the report was to show that there's this great potential. If we make a lot of assumptions you know, and one of those assumptions is that we actually want to do this and that this is a good climate solution, which A lot of independent researchers who've studied RNG have pushed back pretty strongly against the idea that this is going to significantly reduce the gas industry's emissions.

There's a case to be made that if we're capturing methane that would have escaped to the atmosphere anyway. Yeah. That is preventing pollution and that's a good thing. But this report and subsequent reports that ICF has worked on for. States and for individual utilities and cities. Don't just look at that narrow that sort of narrow slice of the RNG production that is the methane that would have escaped as pollution anyway.

They look at how could we make as much of this as possible? And to make as much RNG as possible, you need to literally produce new methane. So at that point, you're not talking about capturing pollution. You're talking about producing more greenhouse gases, some of which are inevitably going to leak to the atmosphere and compound the climate problem.

Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting. Okay. Awesome. Well, we'll, we'll have you back on to talk more about RNG when that, when that comes together. Looking forward to it. Yes. Thank you. And you can read the story on our website. Thanks Maddie. Thanks Amy.