Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power

by Steve Coll

  Lee Raymond still owned Aceh’s deteriorating war—and after Collingsworth’s lawsuit, its potential legal liabilities as well. Notwithstanding its posture of independence and self-sufficiency in Washington, ExxonMobil had required the Bush administration to sort out G.A.M., and it would soon lobby the administration vigorously to quash Collingsworth’s case. In a pinch, the corporation did not hesitate to seek and accept direct help from the United States. Managing civil violence in remote, complex countries would not prove to be one of ExxonMobil’s notable competencies. Yet beyond Aceh, ExxonMobil’s portfolio of risk-producing small wars would only grow.

  Five

  “Unknown Injury”

  On most mornings during the summer of 2001, Mandy Lindeberg tried to rise early, to beat ExxonMobil’s biologists onto the beaches. She slept aboard the Kittywake II, a seventy-two-foot converted wooden tug that she, and a small team of researchers, had chartered on behalf of her employer, the United States government, and in particular the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (N.O.A.A.), which monitored the world’s oceans and weather. Her goal that summer was to survey ninety-one beach segments in Prince William Sound. Under the design of Lindeberg’s study, she and her team would dig at least seven thousand holes. Each day, they shoveled away rocks and sediment on the beaches to a depth of fifty centimeters and then examined the pits for evidence of oil—perhaps left over from the Exxon Valdez spill twelve years earlier, or perhaps from some other source. When they found some, they scooped samples into jars.

  As she moved from place to place, Lindeberg could often see scientists contracted by ExxonMobil following her in the Spirit of Glacier Bay, a 178-foot cruise ship with thirty staterooms. She and her fellow government scientists consulted a Web site about the cruise ship’s luxury features, which they mocked among themselves. An air of rivalry tinted with class and cultural warfare took hold as the summer progressed. Lindeberg could not tell exactly what the ExxonMobil scientists were doing, but they seemed to be monitoring the extent of her pit digging on the beaches. They also dug some of their own holes on the same stretches where she worked. David Janka, a long-haired banjo player and charter captain who worked on related oil research projects with Lindeberg’s team, would peer from the bridge of his motor vessel at the trailing corporate scientists. “The bio-stitutes,” he called them. At least once the ExxonMobil team hired a helicopter to track the movements of the government scientists, Lindeberg recalled.

  At times the ExxonMobil scientists would complain that Lindeberg had used up all of the good sampling spots on a particular beach. Lindeberg thought to herself, “You were having eggs Benedict; we were having our gruel and going to the beach first—that’s not my problem.” But she tried to be diplomatic: “My crew arrived here early this morning,” she told them. “You’re welcome to sample here as soon as we are done.”1

  She was an informal, stout, brown-haired woman in her late thirties who had grown up in the Puget Sound area of the state of Washington. She had studied marine biology in college and then moved to Alaska to work on the marine and wildlife injury assessments after the Exxon Valdez spill; in 1996, she took a position at the National Marine Fisheries Service of N.O.A.A. Most of the year, Lindeberg worked in the state capital of Juneau at the agency’s Auke Bay Laboratories, which included a dilapidated campus of docks, labs, warehouses, and trailers located just off the Glacier Highway. The lab stood on a slope that afforded a spectacular view of Lynn Canal, a part of Alaska’s Inside Passage, which contains fjords teeming with whales, sea lions, and bald eagles. The dress code at Auke Bay was casual. On those rare summer days when the sun shined, the scientists might turn up in shorts and Hawaiian shirts and leave their dogs tied up outside their trailer doors. Almost all of the biologists, chemists, and toxicologists at Auke Bay were, like Lindeberg, long-settled refugees from the Lower 48. Alaska attracted them because of its abundance of understudied natural life. The state also seemed to appeal to personalities with an ornery or independent streak, and the Auke Bay group was no exception.

  After the Exxon Valdez spill, the laboratory had become a center for research about the effects of spilled oil on the natural environment. The Auke Bay team increasingly had to cope with the bands of academic scientists (“from back East”) who turned up in Alaska with lucrative contracts from the oil corporation. Initially, ExxonMobil funded forty or fifty researchers to travel to Alaska each summer to work on the subjects that N.O.A.A.’s smaller network of government-funded scientists also explored; by the summer of 2001, the corporate-funded researchers numbered about a dozen. By processes that remained mysterious to the Auke Bay team, but which they chalked up to the ways of a world fueled by money, the studies published with oil corporation funding never seemed to damage ExxonMobil’s legal position that Prince William Sound had fully recovered from the Exxon Valdez spill. The corporation’s studies sometimes produced similar data to those from the government teams, but the ExxonMobil scientists usually reached different conclusions about what the data implied. Still, the Auke Bay team had never experienced anything quite like the shadowing and monitoring that unfolded after Mandy Lindeberg started digging her seven thousand holes.2

  Twelve years after the accident, Prince William Sound’s rocky beaches looked unsoiled. The initial cleanup undertaken by Exxon in the summers of 1989 and 1990 was almost universally judged a success. But was the oil really gone? Had the fish and wildlife in the area fully recovered? The answers could have legal and financial implications. The original approximately $1 billion settlement among Exxon, the federal government, and the state of Alaska, reached in 1991, contained a Reopener for Unknown Injury clause that allowed the two government parties to seek up to an additional $100 million from ExxonMobil if they could prove environmental damage that was unforeseeable at the time of the original settlement.3

  There had been signs that oil remained in pockets underneath some of the beaches. Lindeberg’s hole digging might provide evidence to support such a reopener claim. Her summer study was the latest in a series of attempts by N.O.A.A.’s Auke Bay team of biologists and toxicologists to document spilled oil’s lingering and less visible impacts. That research involved fundamental questions about the sources of oil’s harmful effects on natural environments. In the long run, ExxonMobil and the entire oil industry had an economic interest in those findings, too.

  The battle between ExxonMobil and N.O.A.A. over Mandy Lindeberg’s work illuminated a larger, recurring aspect of the corporation’s influence over American public life. Whether the subject was the damage caused by oil and gasoline spills, climate change, the safety of chemicals ExxonMobil manufactured, or other critical matters involving public health and the environment, the corporation joined directly in scientific controversies to protect its interests. It contracted with academic scientists, and it brought staff scientists out of ExxonMobil laboratories to lobby Congress and regulatory agencies. ExxonMobil’s science bore all the hallmarks of the corporation’s worldwide strategy: It was well funded, carried out by highly competent individuals, unrelenting in its focus on core business issues, and influenced by the litigation strategies of aggressive lawyers. Even the corporation’s most ardent opponents conceded that the individual ExxonMobil staff scientists they encountered were typically ethical and professional. The question that nagged those on the receiving end of ExxonMobil’s blended campaigns of research, lawsuits, and political lobbying was whether the corporation’s science could be judged honest.

  Jeffrey Short, the chemist who served as the lead scientist for Mandy Lindeberg’s hole-digging enterprise, first came north to take a job excavating ditches for N.O.A.A.’s fisheries division on the Alaskan peninsula. He had grown up during the Sputnik era around Edwards Air Force Base, in Lancaster, California, where his father was a rocket engineer. Once, playing outside on a summer evening, Short saw a bright light on the horizon, in the direction of the base; when he came home, his father explained that one of the Atlas rockets he worke
d on had exploded. Perhaps not surprisingly, the younger Short grew into “one of those nerd kids that was blowing stuff up.” He once forced an evacuation of his family’s house when an experimental vacuum chamber he had made from an old refrigerator compressor spewed sulfur dioxide gas. At the University of California he studied philosophy and biochemistry. He moved into physical chemistry in graduate school and then earned a doctoral degree in fishery biology at the University of Alaska. He grew into a wiry man with thinning brown hair and a face that seemed to radiate bemused curiosity.4

  Short’s training in both biology and quantitative chemistry drew him toward the chemical mysteries of oil as far back as the 1970s, when the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System first began to pump crude to Valdez. At that time, the U.S. government had not conducted much study about what effects spilled or seeping oil might have on a marine environment such as Prince William Sound. Federal government and oil company research programs provided funding for Short and other scientists to examine the subject.

  As of the mid-1970s, most of the research into oil’s poisonous effects on fish and mammals had been derived from the methods used to assess chemical compounds for the insecticide industry. Those methods focused on short-term, or “acute,” toxicity—how much of a particular compound was required to kill half of exposed animals after ninety-six hours of continuous exposure. Such assessments could make clear to manufacturers and regulators which compounds were the most immediately poisonous and required special handling. But ninety-six-hour bioassays, as research chemists refer to them, constitute a narrow way to consider the full toxic potential of a chemical compound. As he began to think about oil, Jeffrey considered that there might be other, longer-term effects on an animal after an initial oil exposure.

  Petroleum is referred to as a fossil fuel because it was formed from the remains of ancient algae and zooplankton. (Early in the twentieth century, scientists believed oil came from the remains of dinosaurs; the more recent theory that the source was mainly microscopic plant life is widely accepted, but still relies on some speculation.) The plant residues were gradually transformed into oil across eons by heat and pressure beneath the earth’s surface. Because oil originated in biomass, it is chemically complex; each batch of petroleum presents a distinct blend of hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds. Researchers have characterized only a small percentage of oil’s full chemical makeup, but they have divided the most abundant and easily separable compounds into several classes of hydrocarbons—that is, combinations with distinct arrangements of the elements hydrogen and carbon. One class, known as aliphatic hydrocarbons, is essentially safe for living creatures. Another class, the asphaltenes, is often what is left over after oil is refined by industrial processes; these compounds are used to glue rocks together as asphalt. A third class, called aromatic compounds, has the potential to damage living tissue and biological systems.

  About a week after the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef, Jeffrey Short found himself on a boat headed into Prince William Sound to participate in the first round of environmental damage assessments. He was interested in which compounds from the spilled oil were dissolving into seawater, at what concentrations, and at what levels of depth. At first he collected seawater directly, but soon he began to use bay mussels as his measuring instruments. A single mussel will pump a liter of water through itself in an hour as it scavenges for nutritious particles. In the process it will gather and concentrate pollutants with unusual efficiency. Short dropped cages full of mussels into Prince William Sound and lowered them to varying depths—at one, five, and twenty-five meters. “We weren’t really sure how big the impacts were going to be below the surface,” he recalled. “The predominant thinking at the time was that there would not be much in the way of effects.” His mussels provided an initial baseline measurement of oil dissolved in the sound’s seawater.5

  The traditional studies suggested there should not be large fish kills because the dissolved concentrations of aromatic compounds would not be high enough. Yet scientists never really had had the chance to study this assumption in the field or to explore the possible “sublethal” or subtler, long-term effects of spilled oil, which might damage fish or animals without killing them outright. Short knew it sounded coldhearted, but he regarded the Exxon Valdez accident as a historic opportunity to see how a big oil spill might affect marine life outside a lab.

  Of Prince William’s marine inhabitants, salmon and herring were the two species that mattered most, economically. Five large commercial hatcheries dotted the sound’s shores. Together, they formed one of the largest pink salmon hatchery systems in the world. Pink salmon particularly suited Jeffrey Short’s research agenda because the fish’s life cycle and migration patterns are strictly predictable. Whether it is wild or commercially hatched, a pink salmon born in Prince William Sound will swim out from its birthplace to the Gulf of Alaska and return two years later to its exact place of origin.

  After their initial water measurements using mussels, Short and his colleagues, along with other government-funded scientists at the Auke Bay Laboratories and elsewhere, studied the mortality rates of salmon hatched from streams along beaches that had been heavily oiled by the Valdez spill. They compared these rates of mortality to those of fish hatched along beaches that had not been oiled. A mystery soon presented itself. Several years after the initial spill, when the surface oil had been cleaned up and the beaches seemed restored, the scientists observed lower survival rates among fish reared downstream from beaches that had earlier been oiled. In the places with the lower survival rates, fish embryos and young fish had likely been exposed to dissolved oil, but in very low concentrations—not enough to harm them, according to traditional bioassay studies.

  One possibility was that dissolved aromatic compounds from oil might have harmful effects on fish embryos or fish development at much lower levels of concentration than previously believed. If so, the toxic compounds might create defects in young fish that could be difficult to detect through clinical observation because the fish wouldn’t necessarily all die of the same cause; their weakened condition might play out in an ocean environment, over the fish’s lifetime, in varied and unpredictable ways. As evidence emerged to support this hypothesis, one of the scientists working with Short, Ron Heintz, had an inspiration: Auke Bay could set up its own pink salmon hatchery, expose embryos and young fish to varying levels of oil, send the fish out to sea, and count their mortality rates two years later, when they reliably returned to their birthplace. “Here’s an idea!” Short exclaimed when he heard the proposal. “We should do that!” It was an expensive and risky experiment by government standards—more than a half million dollars. But they won approval in 1996.

  Over the next several springs, Auke Bay’s scientists and their collaborators tagged tens of thousands of pink salmon and then counted and examined the fish as they returned. This work produced a significant scientific discovery: Dissolved or exposed oil did have a sublethal toxic effect at levels of concentration many hundreds of times lower than previous research had suggested was dangerous. (The scientists could not initially explain why oil caused elevated mortality rates, only that it did. Later research by other scientists showed that oil exposure could damage a fish’s heart as it developed, which in turn damaged the circulation system and sometimes produced early death. The Auke Bay scientists later found the same effect when they studied herring and cod embryos; other scientists would reproduce the results with zebra fish and mummichogs.) The damage caused by oil exposure did not seem to be passed down from one generation of fish to the next, however; at least, Jeffrey Short’s team could not demonstrate such an intergenerational effect. Salmon populations steadily recovered in Prince William Sound after the initial disruptions. The single-generation effects of oil toxicity meant ExxonMobil was probably off the hook for further financial damages on that score.6

  Still, as a result of the Auke Bay’s post-Valdez work, the underlying science about the dangers of oil sp
ills to marine environments had been revised, at least in the opinion of the N.O.A.A. team and other scientists who reviewed and duplicated their findings. This might influence the environmental liabilities of ExxonMobil and other oil corporations when other spills occurred. “It was a really unexpected and pretty profound change” in how scientists “viewed oil toxicity,” Short said.

  As the team’s work was published, ExxonMobil began to fund competing studies using other methodologies and sample sizes; all of the studies the corporation supported challenged the premise that oil was dangerous in the way that the N.O.A.A. team suggested. ExxonMobil employed many chemists in its refinery and research divisions. Its scientists did not dispute the notion that certain aromatic compounds such as benzene, toluene, and xylene could be dangerous to living beings. However, ExxonMobil did not accept the finding by the N.O.A.A. scientists that dissolved oil present in a natural breeding ground might harm embryo development, even after the Auke Bay’s original salmon study was replicated and extended to other species.

  The corporation’s resistance and argumentation did not particularly bother Short, once the confirming studies from other noncorporate scientists came in. “I think in the wider scientific community we’ve won that battle, because other people have independently replicated it and figured out the biochemical mechanisms underlying it, and in fact there’s some really elegant work done by people who are not us. So they [ExxonMobil] can have that position if they like, but most people think it’s flawed.”7