Big Oil is Bursting With Excitement for a Trump Victory

In an op-ed published at the New York Times on Monday, journalist and author Jonathan Mingle wrote that the oil and gas industry is “afraid” of a Kamala Harris victory. Big Oil is suffering from “anxiety” that Harris would essentially continue the Biden administration’s climate policies, and potentially ramp up efforts to shift to electric vehicles and clean sources of power.

This isn’t wrong, as far as the differences in potential policy go, but I don’t think fear or anxiety about Harris is the primary emotion seeping through the executive ranks of our rankest industry. No, they aren’t scared of Harris — they’re just giddily, frothingly, over-the-moon thrilled at the prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House.

As Mingle points out in his op-ed, Big Oil has done just fine under Biden, setting records for oil and gas production, launching massive new projects, and more or less guffawing in the general direction of the energy transition. But what a theoretical second Trump term is reminding those executives is: we could do even better. We could be richer and more powerful. Bigger. Oilier.

Back in April, Trump met with oil industry execs and simply asked them for a billion dollars in exchange for, more or less, free reign to do whatever they want with him in office — a “deal” for the industry, given the excess profits that would roll in. Since then, led by billionaire founder and executive chairman of Continental Resources Harold Hamm, the money has been pouring in. “We’ve got to do this because it’s the most important election in our lifetime,” Hamm has told potential donors, according to the Washington Post.

And on Friday, the Post reported that an oil industry trade group called the American Exploration and Production Council (AXPC) has joined in the Project 2025 trend of carefully writing down their evil plans. An investigative group called Fieldnotes obtained documents outlining essentially a gleeful wishlist for a subservient president: roll back a half-dozen or more Biden executive orders, kill a methane emissions tax, and more. The plans are grim enough that AXPC members as comically evil as ExxonMobil attempted to distance themselves from them once they became public.

Minor public backtracking aside, this is an industry that smells blood in the water. The prospect of an administration whose overarching climate policy is to literally make every aspect of it worse is sitting right there for them, and the industry is quivering with joy, collectively imagining a years-long swim through their money pile, emissions trajectories be damned.