Jack N. Gerard

In 2009 Greenpeace published a memo from Jack Gerard to the American Petroleum Institute's member companies. It asked them to get employees out to a series of rallies against the cap-and-trade bill then moving through Congress, and it promised that "API will cover all organizational costs". The rallies went ahead under the name Energy Citizens, critics called the whole thing astroturf, and at one Texas event, according to the institute's Wikipedia entry, organisers turned away local residents who did not work in the industry. Gerard had been in the job less than a year, having come to API from the American Chemistry Council and before that the National Mining Association, so oil was the third industry he had defended in eight years. The memo is the best short description of how he worked: he treated a trade association, then about 90 years old, as a campaign organisation with members to mobilise and a public to persuade. By the time he left, API said it had built a grassroots network of 45 million voters covering every congressional district.

Ten years, one lobby, one leaked memo, and an export ban gone.

Gerard grew up on a family farm near Mud Lake, Idaho, where his father sold John Deere tractors; the Deseret News profile of December 2008 puts the farm at Terreton, in the same district. He spent one year at the University of Idaho, served a mission for the Church in Sydney, Australia, and then went to Washington, where George Washington University gave him a bachelor's degree in political science and a law degree. The rest reads as a ladder.

Note the overlap. From 2010 to 2016 he was both the chief lobbyist for the oil industry and an Area Seventy responsible for Church units from Virginia to Ontario, an ecclesiastical role on top of a job that, by API's own account in 2018, was the longest of his career.

The American Petroleum Institute was founded on March 20, 1919, moved from New York to Washington in 1969, and by the 2020s represented close to 600 companies on a budget of about $239 million (2022 revenue, per its Wikipedia entry). Gerard arrived on November 1, 2008, with a new administration about to take office and a cap-and-trade bill on the way. He cut headcount, narrowed the list of things API lobbied on, and widened the list of people it talked to, adding the AFL-CIO and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to its outreach. The signature win came late: in December 2015 the ban on exporting American crude oil was lifted, after API had argued that the restriction helped the oil supplies of hostile nations. The institute's January 17, 2018 announcement of his departure also credited him with preserving a tax and regulatory framework favourable to drilling and refining, with setting up the Center for Offshore Safety, with membership growth of nearly 50 percent, and with tripling API's presence in overseas markets through the Singapore, Dubai and Rio offices. Darren Woods, API's chairman, called him "an extraordinary leader for the oil and natural gas industry during a time of challenge and opportunity". Gerard's own line was shorter: "I have served for 10 years at API, which is the longest tenure of my career. I'm ready for my next challenge." Two things belong on the other side of the ledger, both from Wikipedia. The 2009 rally memo drew the astroturfing charge described above, and the institute is described as having funded researchers, among them Willie Soon, who played down climate risk while taking industry money; Wikipedia does not date that to his tenure, and neither will I. In the 2012 election he was a major backer of Mitt Romney's presidential run. The next challenge turned out not to be a corporate one. His contract ended in August 2018, and by then he had already been a General Authority for five months.

A General Authority Seventy serves full time, members will tell you, and the role is a job rather than a title. Gerard's assignments since March 31, 2018:

• Executive director of the Church's Public Affairs Department.
• In July 2018 he spoke at the NAACP national convention to announce a joint education and employment-skills initiative between the Church and the NAACP.
• The same year he was, in Wikipedia's words, "a key voice" in the Church's push for Utah to pass laws regulating medical marijuana.
• From August 2023, a counselor in the Europe Central Area presidency, and from August 1, 2026, its president.

Before any of that he had held the usual run of lay positions: ward mission leader, scoutmaster, Young Men adviser, bishop, president of the McLean Virginia Stake, and, by his own account on the Church's website, nursery leader, which he names as his favourite calling. Outside the Church he chaired the National Capital Area Council of the Boy Scouts and served on the board of GWU's Graduate School of Political Management. Asked by the Deseret News in December 2008 how he fitted a stake presidency around a new job running the oil lobby, he gave the answer members give: "If you put service first, everything else falls into place." That was the month he started at API. The claim is easy to make and hard to audit. The one measurable thing is that the same man was sustained by a trade association's board in 2008 and by a worldwide church in 2018, and that in between he did both jobs at once for six years.