Stakeholder Short Paper
Write a 3- to 5-page (double spaced) paper about a particular U.S. stakeholder and their interests in energy policy. It can be a private firm, an NGO, or even a government agency (just note that government agencies are often the hardest to effectively profile, since they’re not officially allowed to lobby, and their orientation and activities tend to change based on who’s occupying the White House).
Who is your stakeholder? How big are they, and what do they do? What do you think they want from US Energy Policy? Have they spent any money to lobby on behalf of their energy interests (in other words, how you know what they want)? Have they made contributions to political campaigns? Do their interests surprise you?
Determining what your stakeholder wants can be tricky. The best place to start is to look at their website. Often your stakeholder will be pretty clear on what they want, but beware the dangers of greenwash! Virtually no website will say, “We want to weaken environmental laws so that we can make more money at the expense of society at large!” Looking at corporate websites, apparently EVERYONE is an environmentalist… It might be useful to look at what the company is actually doing, how large any clean investments are, etc. The comparison of what they say versus what they do, so to speak, is often interesting.
Make sure to include in-text citations as well as a bibliography to show your sources.