191: Drew Biemer on Energy Sector Civil Affairs

Today, Assad Raza interviews Drew Biemer, an energy outreach strategist and senior advisor to the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission. Drew has experience leading domestic and international campaigns to support energy sector projects and came on the show to discuss how Civil and Public Affairs are key to building positive relationships between projects and the population. 

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One CA is a product of the civil affairs association 

and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com 

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

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Special Thanks to Sahraoui and Fadela for providing the sample of "Mani" from the album Arabic Groove. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCJI52eWDLw&list=PLloxRkIwt8TNujJnQFxjH7kJ0yjKJkpeg&index=7

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Transcript

00:00:03    Introduction

Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail dot com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes.

 

00:00:39    ASAD RAZA

I'm your host, Asad Raza, and today our guest is Drew Beamer. Drew is a management and communications professional with 20 years of experience in governmental, public, and civil affairs. He is the current administrator of the Site Evaluation Committee, SEC for short, the Agency Directorate for Energy Facility, Sitting, Permitting, and Enforcement of Compliance, in the U .S. state of New Hampshire. Thank you, Drew. I've been following your Baseload Power newsletter on LinkedIn for a while, and you touched on a broad list of topics from leadership to strategy to include civil affairs and information operations. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me.

 

00:01:12    DREW BEAMER

1. It's great to be here. So what got you interested in the topic? Well, my early career was spent in political campaign management, and I segged into public affairs on energy and infrastructure projects in my 30s. That was a very interesting time because I got to see firsthand a lot of the strategies and tactics that seemed to work and that seemed to not work in energy and infrastructure development. I've spent a lot of time in the United States and in Africa working on energy projects. And one of the reasons I'm interested in civil affairs as a discipline and as a strategy is a lot of these concepts translate well. into infrastructure development. And I'm definitely a squeaky wheel on this stuff because a lot of the infrastructure developers don't take these things seriously. They believe they can just go in and they can tell you the benefits of a project and that you're going to support it. And then that's it. So I'm passionate about this topic because as the United States strives for our own energy security, as we strive to extend our hegemony throughout the developing world. This topic is extremely important. And as you've mentioned on your podcast before, this is the last three feet of diplomacy. And the last three feet is probably the most important.

 

00:02:35    ASAD RAZA

Drew, I really like how you are applying civil affairs strategies and information operations to civilian sectors, specifically the infrastructure development. So why are civil affairs strategies important in energy resource development?

 

00:02:48    DREW BEAMER

Well, one thing that energy developers need to realize, every single boot on the ground, is an arm of this operation. Every single person who interacts with the local community, whether you're a line worker on a utility project or you're a soldier in theater, the tactical missteps can create massive strategic problems. And one of the things that energy developers do not take seriously is that even if you're working on a domestic energy project in the United States, the local population is going to view you as an occupying force. That doesn't mean they'll view you in a negative light. It just means that they will view you as an occupying force. Most of the time, your construction workers and your contractors are going to be new people to the region. They're going to have cultural differences that may rub locals the wrong way. And what you really need to focus on is how do we endear ourselves to the local population? How do we let them know that we're going to be good community partners? is not achieved by simply telling them things. You need to actually build that capital and you need to build that capital before you need it. Because a lot of projects will just parachute in and they'll say, hey, we're here to help support our project. And that's not an effective strategy. You need to be on the ground in advance. You need to be listening to folks. You need to be helping them address their problems. And then once you've built capital, then you can call on that capital when it comes time to build something and you need local support.

 

00:04:25    ASAD RAZA

Drew, I like the way how you frame that. When we were in Iraq and Afghanistan, they had a saying about the strategic corporal, that corporal that's on the ground engaging with the local population. Any actions that they're doing can have a strategic impact negatively or positively. So what are some of the common pitfalls that developers fall into during the process? There's a phrase called the engineer's fallacy.

 

00:04:47    DREW BEAMER

the engineer's fallacy. And the engineer's fallacy states that an engineer will interpret any lack of support, any deficit in support as the stakeholders not having all the facts. So what I mean by that is I propose a project. You're a local stakeholder. You oppose the project. The engineer's fallacy says that I will address your opposition with just more facts because I believe in the project so much that I believe. that any opposition from you is just a deficit of facts. I don't take into account that it might be an emotional argument. I don't take into account that I've failed to build capital with you. And this engineer's fallacy is inherent in a lot of civil affairs context. You certainly look at some of the hearts and minds campaigns that we've embarked on in the 20th century and the early 21st century. is you don't win hearts and minds by just telling people why your way of life is the best, right? You don't win hearts and minds on an energy project by going into the region and just selling people on facts alone. You need to build capital with people. So one of the pitfalls that developers fall into is, first of all, they're not in the field early enough. They show up when they support, not before. And then they don't take into account the fact that a lot of these arguments become cultural and or emotional arguments, not necessarily factual arguments. So you need to exercise a good bedside manner. You need to make sure that locals know that you are there to help them solve their problems, rather. And once you've done that effectively, then you're going to get support. or minimally you're going to mitigate opposition.

 

00:06:43    ASAD RAZA

Interesting when you're talking about the engineer fallacy, engineers motivated or driven by facts when other stakeholders, specifically the local populations, are probably viewing the problem through either emotions or some other interest versus just the facts alone. So how do you shift the mindsets for engineers that are focused on the facts and driven by their own views and help them to look at the problem through the local population's eyes? That's a good question. I would say that civil affairs,

 

00:07:09    DREW BEAMER

that civil affairs, public affairs, government affairs is important enough that the person running the entire project should be from one of those disciplines. They should not be an engineer. And this goes into a lot of corporate environments and a lot of governmental environments where people promote subject matter experts, the leadership positions. And there's a saying that when you're a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When you're an engineer in charge of a major. infrastructure project, every problem looks like an engineering problem. So one of the things that I did in the private sector as a consultant is I would get put over top of these big projects. They could be adjacent to energy development or they could be like disaster power restoration projects. We have to communicate real time with stakeholders in the community and you need to communicate with local elected officials and local governments to give them real time updates. So in those scenarios, they would call on people like me to lead an ad hoc team that we assembled. And that team would include people who are above my pay grade. I mean, they would have people who are directors and VPs of companies. You'd have external consultants. You'd have people who had more experience. And the way that you get them out of that engineer fallacy mindset, you need the person running it to understand the nuances of the campaigns. You need to demonstrate proof of life on your concepts. You need to be able to demonstrate how focusing on things like civil affairs and public affairs make everybody's life easier. Because when you avoid those small tactical missteps, you don't create major strategic blunders for yourself. And the other issue is once you've painted yourself or you've allowed opponents to paint you as an occupying force, anything you do positively or negatively will be held against you. I've worked in scenarios where we were trying to build an energy project and the developer had let the information space get away from them. And they would say things like, we may have to use eminent domain to get the property needed for this project. And people would say, well, that's corporations taking private property. Then the developer would say, well, we're just going to pay a lot of money. We're going to pay several times value for your project. And the opponents would say, now you're just paying people off. You want to avoid those damned if you do, damned if you don't situations. And one of the issues, circle back to the crux of your question, is the engineer's fallacy is avoidable for the same reason a lot of these types of issues are avoidable. I would recommend against putting a subject matter expert in charge of one of these projects. You need somebody who's more of a generalist and more of a manager. And just like a military operation, you want the commanding officer to understand all the different components. They don't have to be an expert in all the components, but they have to know how they work synergistically with one another to create a holistic operation. And an engineer, generally speaking, is not going to be very good at that.

 

00:10:13    ASAD RAZA

That makes sense. Engineers aren't developed to think like that. They're developed to be engineers and be subject matter experts within their field. So which makes sense. You hit something and you're talking about how your competitors can exploit these tactical mishaps. So how can some of these energy projects become proxy wars between their competitors or their meat peers? In the United States, you have a dynamic that's called astroturfing.

 

00:10:36    DREW BEAMER

a dynamic that's called astroturfing. I'm assuming it exists elsewhere in the world. But astroturfing is basically the manufacturing of grassroots, okay, through dark money. So when one company proposes an energy project, you'll see grassroots opposition crop up. They'll all be singing off the same sheet of music. The messaging will be dialed in. They'll have branded collateral materials. They'll have yard signs. They'll have t -shirts. And I would say nine times out of 10, that opposition is funded and ginned up by whoever your competitor is, usually an industry incumbent. Okay. So there's a dynamic that we've seen in proxy wars in the past hundred years anyway. And that is that In a proxy war, sometimes you want to defeat the enemy, but other times you just want to bog them down. You just want them to bleed out money forever and ever and ever. So you were building a hydroelectric project and your chief competitor in the market was a nuclear power plant. The operators of the nuclear power plant are going to have a cost assessment where they're going to say, if your hydro dam comes online, it's going to cost them X millions of dollars a month in lost revenue. So if it's going to cost X millions of dollars a month in lost revenue, then if they can delay you by a year, they've just made X times 12 in found money. So what they will do is they will hire political operatives to create a grassroots insurgency against your project. And bringing it back to the engineer's fallacy, the grassroots insurgency will be based primarily on emotion. It will be people who... at the grassroots level who've been convinced that your project is going to completely destroy their way of life for one reason or another. It's going to have environmental issues. It's going to have cultural issues. They're going to throw a lot of messages at the wall and they're going to see what sticks because one of these messages is going to saturate. And the engineer's fallacy is people will look at this grassroots opposition and they'll say, well, we can sway them on. facts and reason and logic. We're just going to tell them how clean the power is, how many jobs it's going to create, how it's going to improve energy security and lower energy prices. We keep telling them those facts. They'll have no other choice but to eventually support us. And that works almost as well as going into South Vietnam and telling people that the American way of life is the way everybody should live. absent cultural context, absent building capital, the facts are not going to matter, which is why one of the reasons I say, if you think you're going to build something somewhere, get in the field very, very early before your opponents have the opportunity to gin up opposition against you.

 

00:13:38    ASAD RAZA

Drew, I like how you've taken some of these military terms and applied it to the energy sector. I really like the way you've talked about how your competitors can create an insurgency. or in opposition towards whatever project you're focusing on by identifying some of the environmental and social issues that they can exploit and garner that support to counter -counter whatever energy project that you're trying to do in that area. Let's take it to a broader scale. So how is energy policy an appendage of the U .S. global hegemony? Well, if you look at the developing world, they are behind where we are in energy development,

 

00:14:11    DREW BEAMER

where we are in energy development, put it charitably. And they have a lot of issues. Some are security issues, political instability, economic issues. They are going to get their energy from somebody. And it could be us.

 

00:14:24    DREW BEAMER

could be us. It could be near peers. It could be bricks. And what the United States will do recently is we'll try to impose our own cultural values and sensibilities on these countries. And that generally doesn't work. So if you look at a country like South Africa, for instance, they're experiencing load shedding, which is basically rolling blackouts. And the reason they're experiencing rolling blackouts is because the United States and the West pressured them into closing their coal power plants. They were predominantly coal -powered grid. They sourced most of it locally to South Africa. And they had energy security for a really long time. We pressured them to close their coal plants, but they didn't really have a plan in place to replace them. So they're experiencing load shedding. Now, when they come to the United States and they ask us for help with their energy sector, we'll tell them that we'll help them if they implement renewable energy, which is fine. But renewable energy is intermittent, first of all, and it's also context specific. It doesn't all work everywhere. And what they really need is what we call baseload power. Baseload power is a power plant where you flip on a switch and it creates energy. The Russians go into places like South Africa and they just say, whatever you need, we're going to help you with. You're going to build pipelines, we're going to help you. In a drill for natural gas, we're going to help you. So that is how and why you've seen the encroachment of Russian hegemony into places like South Africa and why South Africa is aligning themselves with the BRICS block.

 

00:15:43    SPEAKER_01

going to build pipelines,

 

00:15:48    DREW BEAMER

is how and why you've seen the encroachment of Russian hegemony into places like South Africa and why South Africa is aligning themselves with the BRICS block. Because the United States wants to export our cultural values and sensibilities to South Africa. Countries like Russia go in and they say, how can we help you get more power? And they don't really care if the solution is the politically correct or the environmentally friendly one. Countries that are in a desperate position to get power are going to go with whoever helps them. So context is hugely important. And the United States is still, I believe, the largest exporter of refined petroleum products. And whether or not we move to green energy domestically is a related but separate conversation.

 

00:16:36    DREW BEAMER

We can pursue sustainable energy domestically. And I think that's a noble cause because the more we pursue technology, the cheaper the technology gets. And then we can give that or export that to the developing world. So everybody benefits.

 

00:16:54    DREW BEAMER

Sub -Saharan Africa, they're sitting on massive quantities of fossil fuels, most notably natural gas, especially in Mozambique. Namibia has just made huge discoveries with oil. And their view on the issue is Africa, for most of its modern history, has been colonized. And people have exploited Africa for resources. European and Western powers have exploited Africa for its resources. This is the first time in the modern era that Africa stands at a point where they can actually extract and use their own resources for their own people and their own economic development. And when countries like the United States go over there and they say, no, you should leave the oil in the ground, you should leave the natural gas in the ground, countries like Russia go over there and they say, what do you need? Pipelines, you need technology. Do you need expertise? Do you need engineers? So it's an extension of Western hegemony that we're kind of fumbling the football on right now, to be perfectly honest with you, because if the end goal is to have allies and trading partners around the world, then we should be better at helping those folks solve their own problems. So energy security is a massive issue. It's certainly a massive issue in Africa. They have 600 million people without access to energy. And I think a more thoughtful foreign policy approach would say we are going to empower a lot of these nations to harness their own resources. And maybe only as a bridge fuel. A bridge fuel means a transitional strategy to get them to renewable and sustainable energy. But that's why you see Wagner Group in Africa. That's why you see a lot of political instability. is all poverty in the world basically stems from energy poverty. You can't have industrial agriculture, you can't have heavy industry, and you can't have economic development if you don't have power. So the extent that we can help people get power, we will create more friends.

 

00:19:07    ASAD RAZA

friends. And when you were talking about Russia and their exploitation, or the gaps that we've created in developing countries in Africa, kind of reminded me of the China's Belt and Road Initiative. A developing country would rather partner with someone that doesn't put all these other implications on them to meet some standards that they don't want to meet at the time because they're not prepared, they're not ready, or the population isn't ready for that. Right now, they just want energy and that's what they need. And at times, they're just going to go with who's going to give it to them. So we're talking about civil affairs and information operations and energy development. How do you justify an upfront investment in these type of capabilities in energy development? Well, you can justify it from a cost perspective.

 

00:19:46    DREW BEAMER

at least domestically. If having an effective information operation and civil affairs operation gets your project built on time, then you're not going to have as many overruns on budget. And the cost of an effective civil affairs and information operation strategy is far less, way, way, way less than having your project delayed by a year or two years. When you look at international development in the developing world, especially, The extent that you can control the information space and you can build capital with the indigenous communities and governments, you know, that's a long term investment in resilience because, first of all, it's going to be easier to build a project. But secondly, you're probably not going to have as many security concerns once you do build a project because you've endeared yourself to the local community. So there's no such thing as being too good of a community partner. And I think that when energy developers go into the developing world. I think they look at the security operation as purely like a tactical exercise. How do we have enough force protection to secure the asset? The problem with that is that having an effective civil affairs and information operation, it improves the security situation. It makes it safer because you have less people angry at you. And that's something that's lost on developers abroad and developers domestically, not that domestic. security threats are necessarily a huge issue for power planes in the United States. But the extent that you can endear yourself to the local community, it's definitely, it's an upfront investment in resilience, literally, figuratively, and it's just good practice, in my opinion.

 

00:21:27    ASAD RAZA

It makes perfect sense. Investing in those other stakeholders that are outside of just the bottom line or those that are just focused on the energy side, but focusing on the local population and garner that support in the long run is going to benefit everybody. So, Drew, thanks for sharing your insights on this. You know, it's been really a pleasure discussing the intersection of the use of civil affairs, information operations with the energy and resource sector. It's been my pleasure.

 

00:21:49    DREW BEAMER

Thank you for having me. And I enjoy the podcast. I'm an avid listener. And just keep up the good work.

 

00:21:56    ASAD RAZA

I appreciate your support. That wraps up our episode with Drew today, everyone. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in to the 1CA podcast. Until next time, stay informed and stay engaged.

 

00:22:08    Close

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