TITLE: What Trump promised oil CEOs as he asked them to steer $1 billion to his campaign
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/
EXCERPT: As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.
Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. 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.
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’s remarkably blunt and transactional pitch reveals how the former president is targeting the oil industry to finance his reelection bid. At the same time, he has turned to the industry to help shape his environmental agenda for a second term, including the rollbacks of some of Biden’s signature achievements on clean energy and electric vehicles.
The contrast between the two candidates on climate policy could not be more stark. Biden has called global warming an “existential threat,” and over the last three years, his administration has finalized 100 new environmental regulations aimed at cutting air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, restricting toxic chemicals, and conserving public lands and waters. In comparison, Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and his administration weakened or wiped out more than 125 environmental rules and policies over four years.
In recent months, the Biden administration has raced to overturn Trump’s environmental actions and issue new ones before the November election. So far, Biden officials have overturned 27 Trump actions affecting the fossil fuel industry and completed 23 new actions affecting the sector, according to a Washington Post analysis. The Interior Department, for instance, recently blocked future oil drilling across 13 million acres of the Alaskan Arctic.
Despite the oil industry’s complaints about Biden’s policies, the United States is now producing more oil than any country ever has, pumping nearly 13 million barrels per day on average last year. ExxonMobil and Chevron, the largest U.S. energy companies, reported their biggest annual profits in a decade last year.
Yet oil giants will see an even greater windfall — helped by new offshore drilling, speedier permits and other relaxed regulations — in a second Trump administration, the former president told the executives over the dinner of chopped steak at Mar-a-Lago.
TITLE: ‘A little bold and gross’: Oil industry writes executive orders for Trump to sign
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/08/oil-industry-orders-trump-day-one-00156705
EXCERPT: The U.S. oil industry is drawing up ready-to-sign executive orders for Donald Trump aimed at pushing natural gas exports, cutting drilling costs and increasing offshore oil leases in case he wins a second term, according to energy executives with direct knowledge of the work.
The effort stems from the industry’s skepticism that the Trump campaign will be able to focus on energy issues as Election Day draws closer — and worries that the former president is too distracted to prepare a quick reversal of the Biden administration’s green policies. Oil executives also worry that a second Trump administration won’t attract staff skillful enough to roll back President Joe Biden’s regulations or craft new ones favoring the industry, these people added.
Six energy industry lawyers and lobbyists interviewed by POLITICO described the effort to craft executive orders and other policy paperwork that they see as more effective than anything a second Trump administration could devise on its own. Those include a quick reversal of Biden’s pause on new natural gas export permits and preparations for wider and cheaper access to federal lands and waters for drilling.
The initiative is just one example of the efforts underway from multiple advocacy groups with strong policy agendas — including abortion-rights opponents — to fill in the gaps for Trump’s potential return to the White House. The presumptive Republican nominee has been a vocal supporter of the oil and gas industry, but the companies often chafed at the effects of his policies as president, including his trade wars and the legal challenges that thwarted some of his pro-fossil-fuel actions.
Trump, who is spending many of his days facing trial in a Manhattan courtroom, has had little time to delve into policy issues with industry officials. In his absence, oil industry officials said they’re not sure who speaks for him on the issues they want to address. And while generally unhappy with Biden’s attempts to rein in their industry, some have expressed nervousness about what policies Trump might pursue.
“Other than what Donald Trump says off the cuff, I don’t think they’re taking much advice on energy strategy,” Frank Maisano, senior principal at the government relations firm Bracewell, said of the ex-president’s campaign. “He’s going to complain about gas prices, he’s going to complain about [natural gas], but only in the general sense because the details are complex.”
So oil industry lawyers have decided to fill the breach. Industry representatives have already prepared some executive orders for Trump to sign if he reaches the White House, said Stephen Brown, director of energy consulting firm RBJ Strategies and a former refining industry lobbyist. Undoing Biden’s actions would be a major target.
“You’ll see a lot of Biden regulations that have come out in the past six months checked one way or another,” Brown said in an interview. “It’s going to be like shooting fish in the barrel — there’s just so much to go after.”
TITLE: Big Oil boomed under Biden. So why does it hate him?
https://www.ft.com/content/d64b1fc1-59b6-4fbd-8a88-8d786e4df474
EXCERPT: After the regulatory bonfire of Donald Trump’s four years in office, Biden made tackling climate change a central priority for his administration and vowed to crack down on America’s oil and gas industry. He has brought in environmental rules that range from endangered species protections and a clampdown on methane leaks to restrictions on offshore leasing and the suspension of new licences for the multibillion-dollar terminals needed to liquefy American gas and ship it abroad.
To many Democratic voters, such restrictions are long overdue. But in Midland, the west Texas frontier town where George W Bush spent his childhood, they have made Biden an unpopular man. The city sits at the heart of the Permian, which at 6.1mn barrels a day pumps more than Opec powerhouses such as Kuwait, Iraq or the UAE — and has made the US the biggest oil producer in history.
With six months to go until the presidential election in November, energy policy has emerged as a key battleground between Biden and Trump. The former president is attempting to harness the discontent by telling voters in fossil fuel states that, if re-elected, he would adopt a policy of “drill, baby, drill”.
Yet the rhetoric of the two candidates belies an inconvenient truth for both: America’s oil and gas industry has flourished under Biden. At more than 13mn b/d, production is at record levels, exports of American hydrocarbons have surged and the scale of annual profits has been unprecedented — largely driven by a jump in commodity prices following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Investors in the industry have reaped rewards too, as cash-rich producers showered them with returns. Shares in ExxonMobil have more than doubled since Biden took office and, emboldened by high prices, the industry has also splurged on mergers and acquisitions, making some of the biggest deals in decades.
For many in oil and gas, however, such successes have occurred in spite of the White House — not because of it. Escalation of the regulatory clampdown under a second Biden administration could cause real long-term damage, they warn, chasing away capital and hurting production in the years ahead.
“In Biden’s campaign to become president, he said he was going to end the oil and gas industry — he is doing that,” says Stephen Robertson, executive vice-president of the Permian Basin Petroleum Association.
“There have been over 200 actions taken by this administration opposed to the oil and gas industry,” he adds. “There’s not one of these that will be the end of the industry . . . but there’s going to be a straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
But Ali Zaidi, Biden’s national climate adviser, counters that claims the administration has declared war on the industry is a “misplaced characterisation” of its intentions.
“The focus is not on a firm. The focus is not on a fuel. The focus is on emissions — and on setting our country up to win the economy of the future,” Zaidi says. “The global consensus is that the world needs to transition away from fossil fuels on an accelerating pace in this decade and obviously continuing into the decades that follow.”
TITLE: Climate Change Concerns Dip
https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_050624/
EXCERPT: “Most Americans continue to believe climate change is real. The difference in these latest poll results is a decline in a sense of urgency around this issue,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute. A Monmouth poll released last month found only 15% of voters view climate change as a determinative issue in how they will vote in the 2024 presidential election, ranking far lower than inflation, immigration, and abortion.
Less than half (46%) of the American public sees climate change as a very serious problem. This number is higher than it was nine years ago (41% in 2015), but is decidedly lower than in more recent polling (54% in 2018 and 56% in 2021). Compared to three years ago, climate change concern has declined by 8 percentage points among both Democrats (77% very serious, down from 85% in 2021) and Republicans (13%, from 21%) and by 13 points among independents (43%, from 56%).
There has also been a drop in support for government action on climate change. Just over half say it is either extremely important (29%) or very important (23%) for the federal government to address the issue. This is down from 6 in 10 who felt this way less than three years ago (33% extremely and 27% very important in September 2021). Currently, 59% support and 36% oppose the U.S. government doing more to reduce the type of activities that cause climate change and sea level rise. While a clear majority continue to support government action, this number is lower than past polling (66% in 2021, 69% in 2018, and 64% in 2015). Most Democrats (89%) support government action on climate change while few Republicans (30%) feel the same. These results are nearly identical to 2021. However, support among independents has dropped significantly over the past three years (55%, down from 67% in 2021).
“Support for climate action remains relatively high in absolute terms, but it has softened due to a drop in the sense of urgency on this issue, particularly among younger adults,” said Murray.
SEE ALSO:
Biden brags about his environmental record to win young voters, but most have no idea what he's done to fight climate change
https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-climate-change-young-voters-environment-greenhouse-emissions-ev-2024-5
10 Big Biden Environmental Rules, and What They Mean
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/climate/biden-environmental-rules-epa.html
REMINDER:
The Deep State of Denial About Trump’s Oily Presidency
https://newsvandal.com/2019/06/the-deep-state-of-denial-about-trumps-oily-presidency/