When Donald Trump invited about 20 prominent oil and gas executives to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago in April, he made a breathtakingly corrupt proposal: If they raised a billion dollars to help him retake the White House, he would roll back any policy they didn’t like when he took office. Several fossil fuel companies and their executives have since answered his call with brio, becoming among the top donors to the Trump campaign and Trump-aligned super PACs.
As clean energy begins to challenge the dominance of oil and gas, what some industry barons and their allies fear most is being perceived — by investors, policymakers and the public — as entering a state of terminal decline. If Kamala Harris wins the presidency, she could hasten the arrival of that moment by pursuing policies and regulations that would lead to lower consumption of oil and gas. If Mr. Trump is the victor, the industry is betting he will slam the brakes on the clean energy transition, prolong demand for oil and gas and help maintain the primacy of fossil fuels for decades to come.
So much anxiety might seem puzzling given that the Biden years have been very good for U.S. oil and gas producers. Domestic oil production is at record highs. The United States is the world’s top producer and leading exporter of natural gas, and profits of companies such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron have surged, too. Even Mr. Biden’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, offers the industry generous subsidies, thanks to its tax credits for carbon capture and sequestration and for hydrogen production. The biggest oil and gas producers want Mr. Trump to keep the bill intact if he wins.
But if you take the long view, as these companies do, other policies of the Biden administration — which would probably be continued by a Harris administration — could pose a significant threat to their interests.
Take, for example, the federal government’s pause on approving new gas export facilities. Liquefied natural gas export terminals have proliferated on the Gulf Coast over the past decade as demand from foreign buyers has risen. But in recent years, scientists and climate activists have raised concerns about the methane emissions associated with cooling and shipping gas overseas.
In January, in an apparent concession to this mounting pressure, Mr. Biden’s Department of Energy put on hold its permitting for most new projects so that it could update how it determines whether these projects are in the public interest. This pause did not affect several projects that were already approved and under construction, which will nearly double the amount of gas the United States exports by 2028 once completed. (In July, a federal judge ruled against the suspension in a case brought by Republican-led state attorneys general. The agency is appealing it.) But the industry is furious anyway, because it sees gas exports as key to its long-term viability and the permitting freeze could cool investors’ enthusiasm.
The Department of Energy says it will complete its review in early 2025 and resume giving out permits for gas export facilities after that. If Ms. Harris becomes president, she will inherit this new guidance, which is likely to apply greater scrutiny to the climate-warming emissions and environmental justice effects of new projects.
The industry is wary of an administration that may make climate imperatives a permanent fixture in the public interest equation. That’s why reversing the pause was reportedly one of executives’ top requests of Mr. Trump at their Mar-a-Lago meeting. An attendee told the Washington Post that he promised to give it to them on his first day in office.
Fears about a paradigm shift away from fossil fuels also animate the industry’s pushback against predictions that global demand for oil and gas will peak by 2030. When the widely respected International Energy Agency issued that forecast in late 2023, citing governments’ policies to advance clean energy, major oil executives and their political allies lashed out in response. That included former Trump administration energy policy officials, who pledged to help push out the agency’s head if Mr. Trump is re-elected. Republican senators have threatened to withdraw funding from the I.E.A. unless it changes its forecasting approach.
Why such a fuss? Because when the energy-data agency says the world’s appetite for oil and gas could soon enter a period of permanent decline, investors pay close attention. When the Dutch bank giant ING recently announced it would cease financing upstream development of new oil and gas fields immediately and liquefied natural gas export terminals after 2025, it pointed to I.E.A.’s forecasts as justification.
There are other signs that new oil and gas projects may have trouble attracting capital. The I.E.A. just reported that global investment in clean energy in 2024 is on track to be twice the amount that is flowing to fossil fuels. It’s a trend being felt even in the remote and dusty drilling fields of Texas and Louisiana. In September, the Dallas Federal Reserve’s quarterly survey of hundreds of oil and gas producers in the region elicited complaints of “lack of investor interest in oil and gas exploration.” Some companies chalked it up to uncertainty around the election.
The truth is that nobody knows when the moment of peak oil and demand consumption will come — or when the trickle of investors fleeing fossil fuels will turn into a stampede. But with electric vehicles sales on the rise and eating into demand for oil, and growing deployment of solar and wind energy eating into demand for natural gas, the clean energy transition is now inevitable. The question is how quickly it will unfold.
One thing is certain enough: A Trump victory would drag it out and delay any peak in fossil fuel demand. It would also prolong the industry’s primacy by undoing Biden-era regulations, such as vehicle and power plant emissions standards, that weaken demand for oil and gas. Industry lobbyists have reportedly already prepared a how-to guide for that effort, spelling out exactly which executive orders a Trump administration should cancel first. A President Harris, on the other hand, is likely to maintain those policies and perhaps go even further — for instance, by strengthening new limits and fees on methane leaks from oil and gas production or more aggressively regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
Harold Hamm, the billionaire founder of the oil and gas company Continental Resources, orchestrated that April meeting at Mar-a-Lago, and has since led the charge in rallying fellow fossil fuel executives to support the Trump campaign. “We’ve got to do this because it’s the most important election in our lifetime,” Mr. Hamm told them, according to The Washington Post.
For his part, Mr. Trump has been signaling clearly what kind of return these executives will get on their investment.
Three days after Hurricane Helene struck, Mr. Trump called climate change “one of the great scams of all time.” Three days later he was in Midland, Texas, for a fund-raiser at which oil and gas executives paid up to about $925,000 per ticket to hear him rail against Mr. Biden’s energy policies.
The fossil fuel magnates know that the future is up for grabs in this moment. They have gone all-in on Mr. Trump because they understand the stakes of the alternative: a governing agenda that actually takes climate change seriously.
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