Environmentalists Disarmed by Big Oil & Dems

By the mid-90s the oil industry no longer had any effective foes arguing for public control. Senators like Abourezk and Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio had gone. The public interest groups were successfully unplugged during Clinton time and the credibility of proposals for public control of the nation's energy resources undermined by years of neo-liberal derision coming from groups like the NRDC and the Environmental Defense Fund which saw higher prices as the key to conservation, and which thus helped launch Enron on the world.