David L Goldwyn

Goldwyn currently wears many hats. A member of the DOE's National Petroleum Council, he also is a corporate attorney for the firm Sutherland, a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution and president of oil and gas industry consulting firm Goldwyn Global Strategies LLC. Before opening up his new consulting firm, Goldwyn worked as Special Envoy for International Energy Affairs at U.S. Department of State from 2009 to 2011. While working for the State Department, Goldwyn created the Global Shale Gas Initiative (now known as the Unconventional Gas Technical Engagement Program) and its cousin, the Energy Governance and Capacity Initiative. These programs, in essence, are the State Department's shale gas “missionary force,” in which the Department teams up with U.S. fracking companies to teach “best practices” to countries around the world. A State Department cable obtained by Wikileaks via whistleblower Chelsea Manning reveals Goldwyn also helped Canadian oil companies develop talking points to promote tar sands during his time working as State Department Special Envoy. Prior to working for the State Department, Goldwyn owned another consulting firm called Goldywn International Strategies LLC. It was during his time working for this consultancy that he did some of his most ugly work with the very same “tyrants and dictators” decried in Landrieu's opening statement. In 2008, Goldwyn lobbied on behalf of the U.S.-Libya Business Group at the time the country was under the dictatorial rule of Muammar Gaddafi, who was killed in October 2011. Goldwyn scrubbed this detail from his biography once he got a job at the State Department. He also scrubbed out his former gig as an unregistered lobbyist for Turkmenistan, another U.S.-friendly gas-rich and oppressive dictatorship. Goldwyn did so as the former executive director of the U.S.-Turkmenistan Business Council, which was “primarily funded by American oil companies (Chevron, ExxonMobil, Marathon) hoping to do business in the country,” according to investigative journalist Ken Silverstein. Although dictatorships such as those in Libya and Turkmenistan are “often a threat to their own people, they do not harbor or finance groups that threaten U.S. interests,” Goldwyn once said in a Congressional hearing in speaking to human rights concerns of doing business in these countries. And Goldwyn's latest push: opening up the floodgates for U.S. oil and gas companies to operate inside of Mexico.