A Polluting Energy Secretary?

According to people familiar with the legislation, Sam Bodman was part of the original working group that drafted legislation that Gov. Bush signed into law, basically permitting Cabot and other companies to continue to emit the same levels—and in some cases more—toxic emissions as they had been years earlier without so much as a slap-on-the-wrist . 

Bodman’s shoddy environmental record aside, he may also be complicit in one of Africa’s deadliest wars. In October 2002, Bodman’s former company came under fire when a United Nations panel of experts report accused the company, along with several other U.S. corporations, of helping to fuel the wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) by purchasing coltan during the conflict and illegally plundering the country’s vast natural resources. 

Cabot has publicly denied these allegations, but a report by the Belgian Senate states that Eagle Wings Resources International had a long-term contract to supply Cabot with coltan, which it too purchased from the Congo during the war. Eagle Wings was also identified in the UN report as contributing to the war. 

In response, the U.S.-based environmental group Friends of the Earth (FOE) and the UK-based human rights group Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID) filed a complaint with the U.S. State Department last August against Cabot and several other western corporations claiming they violated the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) “Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises,” a set of international standards for responsible corporate behavior. 

The UN panel said in its report that a “Three-year investigation found that sophisticated elite networks of high-level political, military and businesspersons, in collaboration with various rebel groups, intentionally fueled the conflict in order to retain control over the country’s vast natural resources. The panel implicated many Western companies for directly or indirectly helping to fuel the war.” 

The State Department is the agency in charge of deciding whether U.S. companies breach the OECD guidelines. Despite the allegations included in the UN report and the complaint filed by the two activist groups, the State Department has refused to launch an independent investigation into whether Cabot, under Bodman’s leadership, and the other U.S. companies might have contributed to the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Cabot is the world’s largest coltan refiner. The other U.S. corporations identified in the UN report, Kemet and Vishay, both purchase processed tantalum (the metal extracted from coltan) from Cabot. Under Bodman’s leadership an unknown amount of the coltan Cabot was purchasing could have originated from the DRC. Cabot has stated, “To the best of its knowledge none [of its coltan came] from environmentally sensitive areas in Africa, but it can’t be sure.” 

As Energy Secretary, Bodman will be looking out for the energy behemoths he used to commiserate with while he was chair and chief executive of Cabot, Vice President Dick Cheney being one of them. Many of those energy corporations have donated millions to fund President Bush’s inaugural parties. Cheney wants Bodman to reward their pals by making a convincing case for why the president’s controversial energy policy should sail through Congress, the environment be damned.