Profile XI: Mr. George Baker, Williams & Jensen PLLC
In this issue, The Daily Dynamo met with Mr. George Baker, a principal at Washington, D.C based law and lobbying firm Williams & Jensen and veteran lobbyist for over four decades. Throughout his storied career, he has worked with numerous clients in the energy,environmental and natural resource conservation space, effectively representing them on Capitol Hill and in federal agencies.
As a lecturer at his alma mater, Hamilton College, Baker teaches a course on lobbying. On the first day, he clears up misconceptions about the lobbying field that are widespread across America, even in the most educated institutions. To him, the definition of lobbying is clear: whenever “the government creates public policy and the people engage it, that’s fairly considered lobbying.” To Baker, lobbying is “the lifeblood of the public policy process.” Furthermore, while many believe lobbying to be exclusive to the halls of Congress, Baker posited that it “extends to judicial, electoral and grassroots venues as well”, and covers every aspect of public policy from the grandest social issues impacting war and peace down to securing a locality’s required construction permit for a residential property.
After serving a three-year stint as a lawyer for the newly established Department of Energy during the late 1970s, Baker started his career at Williams & Jensen on St. Patrick’s Day in 1980, a time when energy issues were of critical importance to American society. “In the 1970s, [there] was this whole perception that the US was running out of oil and natural gas based on an understanding that we had ‘peaked’ as a producer of oil and that America would indefinitely continue to be far more dependent upon foreign energy sources, in particular the OPEC countries,” Baker recalled. Combined with the OPEC boycott, those two factors “precipitated” many policies that dealt with the price and supply of energy, particularly oil and gas.
During his early years as a lobbyist, deregulation of the industry accelerated, setting up a conflict with environmental regulators and climate lobbies in the next decade. In the 1990s, “[climate issues] started playing more of a role and you started to see much more aggressiveness on things like clean air [and] clean water,” which led to a flurry of legislation that regulated natural resource exploitation and land development across the nation. For Baker and many of his clients, life became “much more complicated”, even as they worked to accommodate the new environmental policy demands while maintaining operational sustainability. “When you talk about use of land, you're talking about extraction of minerals, oil, gas, and transportation of them by pipeline, by train, and other means”, Baker stressed, highlighting how far regulations stretched into the operations of his clientele. But with the historic advent of fracking and horizontal drilling in the early 2000s, all prior “peak oil” understandings of U.S oil and gas production capability needed to be “radically reconsidered” as the domestic energy industry entered a new, more volatile and opportunistic age than ever before.
Looking back on the progress of the sector throughout his career, Baker argues that the waves of environmental regulation since the 1990s have introduced a high level of unpredictability and legal uncertainty to the sector. For clients looking to invest large sums of money in long-term energy projects, “there is no factor [more important] than the durability – meaning the long-term predictability and reliability – of environmental laws”, he asserted. Over the last decade, environmental regulations have swung back and forth as political power in Washington shifted between the major parties. To Baker’s clients, “that kind of volatility [in] the regulatory environment can be very debilitating.” While the energy industry has experienced dramatic positive change over the last four decades, Baker sees this element of regulatory uncertainty that now impacts the energy sector as a major continuing challenge. “That sense of regulatory uncertainty did not exist in the same fashion when [I] began [my career] back in the 1970s and 80s. [Now], it's undeniably the truth.”
For Baker, and frankly any effective lobbyist, uncertainty is no stranger, as it’s seen every day in the lobbying profession. “As the public policy environment keeps changing, [a lobbyist must be] constantly aware [of] day to day and intraday developments that can affect [their] strategy [or] tactics in any way”, he posited. According to Baker, no matter what one’s initial strategy was, “all of lobbying is Plan B.” Consequently, one of the hallmarks of a great lobbyist is their adaptability to change.
While there were many campaigns where such adaptability was paramount, Baker pointed out one in particular: an Obama-era campaign he led as the Executive Director of Producers for American Crude Oil Exports (PACE), an industry coalition which successfully urged Congress to lift a prohibition on the export of domestic crude oil. Initially imposed during the 1970s in reaction to the perception that the nation’s domestic supply of oil was in decline, the ban had remained in place well into the 21st century, and long after new drilling technologies had enabled the United States to be the world’s top oil producer. For Baker’s clients, the ban was incredibly detrimental, as it created a domestically-trapped surplus which “diminished the price for everybody” and created disincentive to produce more. With the ability to export, domestic producers “would be able to produce a lot more and sell it to the world,” Baker contended.
While President Obama had the regulatory authority to lift the ban, elements of the environmental lobby and some companies in the domestic refining sector that benefited from the ban made it politically difficult for such unilateral executive action. Thus, he and PACE turned their attention towards Congress, where they found growing bipartisan support for lifting the ban. “At first it was small, but we started making progress little bit by little bit,” Baker recalled, utilizing a litany of strategies to convince once ardent opponents to support the initiative. By having “a whole range of former Obama Cabinet officials... testify to make the case in Congress and to the administration, PACE earned widespread editorial support” in the press, as well as among energy sector suppliers, labor unions and other significant players, and the tide began to turn:
Once we started making progress, all these doubters, both in the energy industry and outside the energy industry, who stood to benefit – people who make pipes, people who make drilling equipment, people who make the computers that they use for seismic drilling, began to signal their support for lifting the oil export ban. Those people might be in Massachusetts or New York, not necessarily in Texas. You had labor unions who would benefit from this. [Consequently], a lot of Democratic constituencies started saying, “Wake up, this is good for us.”
After negotiations with the leaders of the House and Senate, as well as the environmental community, language ending the ban was attached to an end of year appropriations bill along with favorable tax provisions for the environmental lobby. “It was viewed as classic logrolling. And that proved to be a successful strategy,” Baker remarked.
Looking back on the PACE campaign and its success, he sees it as “the most important and successful legislative initiative that the Congress has passed in the last seventy years.” With freedom to export energy on a global scale, Baker views the initiative as a singularly valuable engine of the nation’s job growth, greater domestic and international economic progress, and greater military and diplomatic international capability. “We couldn't be doing what we're doing in Ukraine now if we weren't supplying them energy.”
Considering the magnitude of the initiative’s effects, it’s even more impressive that such legislation was passed through cooperation with an unlikely ally in the environmental lobby. For Baker, this was nothing new. In the 1990s, he led a campaign to comprehensively reform superfund law called “Superfund Reform 95”, where he walked the halls of Congress and lobbied in league with NAACP Director, Ben Chavis. “The curious thing about our coalition was that we had the NAACP, small business, and municipalities working together with the mining, oil and gas and insurance industries” he recounted. When asked why the NAACP would be working with industry in pursuit of structural Superfund reform, Baker said that Director Chavis would explain that ‘It's our communities that get saddled with this [pollution], get exposed to this stuff, who have to breathe it, eat it, drink it.’” Despite three years of lobbying, the group failed to get broad structural reform legislation passed into law. However, similar to the PACE campaign, it was the many obstacles in Baker’s way that revealed another important attribute of great lobbyists: persistence.
“We changed the whole complexion of the Superfund regulatory landscape such that the EPA... gave meaningful liability relief to small businesses... lenders... municipalities... people who were part of our group. My point is we persisted and achieved very meaningful relief for very worthy folks even though we didn't win the big thing we were looking for”, Baker stressed.
In that campaign, he and his coalition still came out victorious. However, Baker recalled the times where things haven’t gone so successfully. “Sometimes you lose or you can't get it done within the time frame that you wanted to. Many lobbying campaigns take several Congresses. You’ve got to keep your ambition [and] positivity up,” Baker said, by illustration pointing to the environmental lobby, which has maintained its course despite numerous setbacks, including the anticipated policy battles with another Trump presidency on the horizon, as an example. “They are committed and persistent, they're not intimidated by the potential that they may lose in a particular battle or even the war.”
However, Baker also observed that in the pursuit of a particular bill or goal, opposing factions often demonize one another. “They work so hard to win and in doing so they can demonize their opponents like they're bad people”, he said, contending that with such hard-fought competition between different interest groups, the business of lobbying can be very emotionally stressful. Yet, it’s the elements of human nature which Baker sees as integral to success in the field. “[It’s] the human characteristics, human qualities, human profile, which have nothing to do with political money, that usually make the difference in attaining success over time”, he contended, stressing the importance of judgement:
“You have to understand how to communicate with people, how to understand them. You have to understand that there's a whole range of crayons in the Crayola box and they come in all different shades. And you have to have the good judgment to know when to pull out this particular color or that color to properly advance the ball. And that can mean understanding when you go public with an issue or when you stay quiet. It could mean when you use a communication structure strategy, or you use a grassroots strategy, or you don't. And if you use one, what's the best way? What's the cost efficient, most effective way to do it? It is all about good judgment.”
Every day, Baker considers these strategies as he advocates for his clients on the Hill and across the federal agencies. Whether it was his work on Superfund law, lifting the ban on crude oil exportation, or his current work to expand tax incentives for carbon sequestration, these are the questions he must continuously answer. With a treasure trove of experience under his belt, he’s well-equipped to navigate the increasingly complex and politically volatile Washington climate for many years to come.
