To be clear, nobody is persecuting the American oil industry. In 2023, the United States produced more barrels of crude oil than any other country on the globe, for the sixth year in a row, and exported more of them than any country has ever done before – almost a million barrels more, each day, than in the last year of Donald Trump’s presidency. But America’s wealthy elites are feeling persecuted these days: by President Joe Biden; by DEI or CRT or whatever we’re using as a stand-in for “diversity”; by the existence of trans people; by the acknowledgment that climate change exists. And when America’s wealthy elites get deep in their feelings, they open up their pocketbooks and ask the forces of reaction to take their damn money.
In a single day, Bloomberg reports, “oil executives and other deep-pocketed donors” threw some $40 million at the Trump campaign, driven by the former president’s pledge to “drill, baby, drill.” Dan Eberhart, a repeat Trump donor and CEO of Canary Drilling Services, explained that he and others in the industry “fear that the current regulatory approach in Washington amounts to death by a thousand cuts for oil and gas companies,” according to Bloomberg. Trump, by contrast, “repeatedly stressed that he stands for what’s good for America, and that we need energy to thrive and keep the economy growing,” in Eberhart’s telling (solar accounted for more than half of all new electricity added to the grid last year, but green energy doesn’t count).
