BP joins list of companies fleeing Alec

British Petroleum is the latest company to pull its membership from the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), the oil company announced on Monday. The oil giant is now the third oil and gas company to leave the conservative nonprofit that acts as a lobbying group.

BP’s departure follows a wave of exits by tech companies from Alec at the end of last year. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, eBay and Yelp all cut ties with the organization following criticism by environmental nonprofits for drafting model legislation that denies any human contribution to climate change.

However BP spokesperson Brett Clanton did not mention the group’s position on climate change in a statement announcing the decision:“We continually assess our engagements with policy and advocacy organizations and based on our most recent assessment, we have determined that we can effectively pursue policy matters of current interest to BP without renewing our membership in Alec.”

BP’s exit comes a few months after Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) announced that it would depart from Alec, and a year after ConocoPhillips, an American multinational energy corporation, did the same. All companies have stayed tight-lipped about precisely why they’ve chosen to leave the group, but a proxy statement for Oxy’s annual shareholder meeting, held in May 2014, sheds some light on the subject. In it, the Needmor Foundation, which holds 800 shares of Oxy stock, proposes that the company review and evaluate its relationships with various trade groups (pdf). In regards to leaving Alec, the foundation wrote:

Alec has been associated with contentious anti-immigration, voter identification and Stand Your Ground, legislation. More recently, Alec initiatives have opposed climate change policies and efforts to weaken state renewable energy standards with the Heartland Institute. Occidental Petroleum is a member of Alec and funds its work. We believe this partnership may bring significant reputational and business risk to the company.

Oxy’s board of directors recommended against the proposal, noting that the company is a member of several trade groups and that a review of all those memberships would be onerous, given that the reputational risk seemed only to be with Alec.

“Occidental contributed only $25,000 in 2011, $12,500 in 2012 and $2,500 in 2013,” the board wrote. “This is a small fraction of the more than $10m a year Occidental spends on trade associations and other organizations. Based on the information it has received from such organizations, only approximately 12% of that aggregate amount was used by those organizations for lobbying purposes.”

Nonetheless, shareholders were sufficiently concerned about the risks of being associated with Alec that after that meeting Oxy announced its intention to leave the group.

Media and public interest groups have speculated that similar factors were at play for BP, but the company insists its decision has more to do with the current economic landscape than any sort of political rift with Alec.

“For us it’s more about just prioritizing what we do on the lobbying level and the groups we choose to be members of and where we can get the most bang for our buck,” said Clanton.