"In April 2024, candidate Donald Trump called on leaders of the fossil fuel industry to dig deep and contribute to his campaign. At this dinner at Mar-a-Lago, candidateTrump pledged to the oil, gas and coal executives that if elected, he would expand offshore drilling, weaken environmental rules, and scrap electric vehicle and wind policies and other regulations opposed by the industry groups. Trump vowed to reverse President Biden’s moratorium on new LNG gas terminals.
Present at the April 11th dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club were leaders of the American Petroleum Institute and executives from Chevron, ExxonMobil, Occidental, ConocoPhillips, and Continental Resources–along with fracking producers Cheniere Energy and EQT.According to several witnesses at the meeting, Trump told the assembled that the amount of money they would save in taxes and legal expenses after he repealed regulations would more than cover their billion-dollar contribution."
Climate Research Accountability Project
This dinner with Big Oil was in the news. I heard about it. I don't know how it was spinned on Fox or social media to get half the electorate to buy into full-bore "burn baby burn" in 2025, with the promise of cheap gas I'm assuming, but, alas, it was.
Democracies in history have always been vulnerable to internal factional struggles for power. Such factional disputes tore apart the Roman Republic. The people who wrote the Declaration of Independence and Constitution knew this. That's why they built in all the separation of powers stuff, to prevent one faction (or political party) from becoming too dominant, too hostile to other interests. It's worked, more or less (I mean, this isn't our first democratic failure), for nearly 250 years.
Historians like to euphemise the problem, the threats to democracy, as Special Interest Politics. But one risk with this view is it tends to flatten comparisons between interests groups, and so obscure the overwhelming influence of Big Biz and Billionaires as an interest group and their hostility to labor rights, environmental protections, health care rights, and generally community infrastructure of any kind beyond the police and military backup necessary to protect their private property and right to freely accumulate wealth.
"Burn baby burn" might reduce gas prices in the short run but it will not reduce the cost of the transition to electric cars, nor will it reduce the ravages of climate change on working people's lives, nor will it improve our global position economically but, in fact, is ceding dominance in the 21st century global economy and energy transition to China.
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