The history of America’s reckoning with climate change can be summarized incompletely and too quickly as follows:
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But then the backlash kicked in. Opposition to new limits on carbon dioxide emissions was well-funded and very effective. Barack Obama had become president, and his efforts to move away from greenhouse-gas-heavy systems helped firm up Republican opposition. Climate change went from bipartisan to sharply partisan.
One argument made by advocates for less fossil-fuel use and greener electricity production was that the world was entering a period of transition — one that provided a huge business opportunity for any nation willing to boost the sector. There were warnings, even under Obama, that the United States was quickly falling behind Germany and China in production of things like solar panels and batteries. But investments in green energy, however lucrative in the long run, became points of political pressure.
Something else important happened during the Obama administration, though. Innovations in hydraulic fracturing — breaking apart shale rock over long distances to release oil and gas — began paying off in huge production surges. When Obama took office, the country was producing about 159 million barrels of oil a month. When he left office, the figure was 275 million.
During Trump’s presidency, the figure continued to rise until the pandemic shut down a huge part of the economy. With the immediate shock of the pandemic over, production continued to climb. In December 2023, it hit a record high of more than 411 million barrels.
The president in December, you will recall, was Joe Biden.
This context is useful when considering The Washington Post’s report about Trump’s pitch to oil industry leaders last week.
“You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House,” The Post’s Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow reported. “At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.”
Dawsey and Joselow added: “Giving $1 billion would be a ‘deal,’ Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.”
Trump has long predicated his politics on the idea that oil production is being unwisely hampered, particularly by the Biden administration. He has claimed repeatedly, and falsely, that the United States was energy independent under his administration and not under Biden’s. (The week in which the gap between oil imports and exports was narrowest occurred in February 2023, also under Biden.) When Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he wanted to be a dictator for his first day in office, one of the two reasons he offered for being granted unlimited power was so that he could “drill, baby, drill.”
That this claim doesn’t comport with reality is obviously not disconcerting to Trump. He uses this rhetoric not as an actual critique of policy but to evoke the same sense of nostalgia and fear about a changing world that his “Make America Great Again” motto spurs. His complaints about how showers have too little water pressure or about how gas stoves are better or whatever are not fundamentally about what’s actually happening or why; they’re about how they are trying to make you conform to a new, liberal, awful world. How they are taking what’s yours. (His complaints about wind turbines, by contrast, are rooted in a much deeper mythology.)
Speaking to those oil executives, Trump was making a similar pitch. Yes, he was pledging to block or reverse Biden policies centered on moving away from fossil-fuel consumption. But he was pledging more broadly to be a president who sees climate action as anathema. Someone who would prevent the world from moving forward and prevent the executives’ power and wealth from moving somewhere else.
A $1 billion investment in the Trump presidency, the pitch went, would mean a president who would be a philosophical ally, rather than merely an economic one.
Big Oil won Round 1 in this fight. With the help of Republican legislators and Trump’s 2016 election, the Obama administration’s efforts to bolster the green-energy economy hit a brick wall. The long-term effects of that were encapsulated in a New York Times story this week. “China Rules the Green Economy,” its headline read. “Here’s Why That’s a Problem for Biden.”
“The United States is balancing two competing goals,” the story said. “The Biden administration wants to cut planet-warming emissions by encouraging people to buy things like [electric vehicles] and solar panels, but it also wants people to buy American, not Chinese. Its concern is that Chinese dominance of the global market for these essential technologies would harm the U.S. economy and national security.”
This was precisely the warning that environmental advocates were offering a decade ago as green-energy industries were emerging. Now it’s a political challenge for the guy who was then vice president.
Biden’s infrastructure bill included spending on green industries, such as battery manufacturing. That has made it a focus of criticism from Trump and others, who conflate it with the “Green New Deal” — itself a proposal that got much more traction as a right-wing talking point than as a political effort. If Trump wins in November, he would be in position to sign legislation or direct funding in ways that again hamper the growth of green industries.
That would be a very practical manifestation of his allegiance to the oil industry. But the quid pro quo he offered the executives was the same one he offers the rest of his base: Give me your support and I will keep American culture from changing in ways you don’t want it to.
