This story was originally published here.Inside Climate News Hereclimate deskcollaboration.
As the next president Donald Trump has assembled a team to boost fossil fuel production in a country that already produces more crude oil than any other country in history, and critics have begun using terms once used for vilified enemies.
Specifically, they are asking: Is America on its way to becoming an oil powerhouse?
Jin Su, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Energy Justice Program, raised the issue after Trump nominated Chris Wright, CEO of Denver hydraulic fracturing company Liberty Energy, to be Secretary of Energy. Wright acknowledges that carbon emissions make the planet warmer, but argues that, contrary to scientific consensus, the financial and quality-of-life benefits of increased fossil fuel production outweigh the risks.
“Electing someone like Chris Wright is a clear sign that Trump wants to turn America into an abandoned petrostate,” Su said in an emailed statement. “He is damning frontline communities and our planet to climate hell to line the already bloated pockets of fossil fuel barons.”
Climatologist Michael Mann expressed the same view in an essay shortly after the election. “The United States is now poised to become an authoritarian state ruled by conglomerates and fossil fuel interests,” he wrote. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist. “Now, in a word, it has become an oil country.”
Economists and political scientists say the United States does not fit the classic definition of a petrostate. The economy is much more diverse than that of the country, which suffers from its dependence on oil and natural gas. Moreover, most of the wealth created here by fossil fuel production goes to private parties rather than government coffers.
Still, experts acknowledge that the United States sometimes behaves like a petrostate. For example, in its long-standing inaction on climate change and, more recently, in the way it conducts its foreign policy as the world’s leading exporter of oil and gas. Under President Trump, who does not view climate change as a serious problem and defines ‘energy dominance’ as a policy task, the influence of the fossil fuel industry is bound to be amplified.
“The United States is not necessarily a petrostate, but we are behaving like a state where the hydrocarbon industry is a huge supporter domestically, a source of employment and private sector revenue, and now an exporter,” Cullen Hendrix said. Senior researcher at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
By its own calculations, the oil and gas industry currently accounts for only 8% of the U.S. economy. President Trump will test whether competing interests—businesses, states, and citizens—who favor a clean energy transition can exert enough influence to prevent the United States from going down a path that jeopardizes the governance and economies of countries that rely on the energy transition. Single product.
Trump didn’t During his first term, he succeeded in permanently curbing clean energy aspirations. President Joe Biden was able to restore America’s position in the Paris Agreement negotiations, reverse many of Trump’s deregulation decisions and pass the country’s first comprehensive climate legislation.
But Mann, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and Media, argues the risks are greater in a second Trump term in which wealthy fossil fuel interests will have a lasting advantage in the U.S. political system.
“This time we see that polluters and tycoons are ready to get down to business,” Mann said in an email, pointing to Project 2025, a conservative policy roadmap drawn up by former Trump administration officials and supporters to guide his agenda. I wrote it. “They will waste no time removing obstacles to their fossil fuel industry-driven agenda.”
True oil companies typically have national oil companies and pursue profit maximization as a policy. For example, in Azerbaijan, the country that hosted this year’s international climate talks, oil and gas production accounts for more than 90% of export revenues and more than half of the national budget.
“I think it’s worth remembering that in the United States this is not that unusual.”
In the United States, private and publicly traded oil and gas companies attempt to influence the political process through lobbying and campaign contributions. According to the watchdog group Open Secrets, political donations from the oil and gas industry will reach $219 million in 2024, garnering overwhelming support from Republicans and conservative groups.
But the fossil fuel industry is also woven into the fabric of American politics in a similar way to the fabric of the oil industry. More than 60% of the $138 billion in taxes paid annually by the fossil fuel industry goes to state, local and tribal governments, according to a study by Resources for the Future (RFF), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
Wyoming gets 59% of its state budget from fossil fuel revenues. North Dakota, 29%; Alaska has 21%. Although less dependent, other states receive huge amounts, led by Texas, which amounts to $14.6 billion annually. California, $7.8 billion; Pennsylvania has $4.4 billion. And the money going into state coffers reflects the much larger impact the industry has on the state’s economy and jobs.
Because institutions such as the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate give states greater power relative to their populations, regions dependent on fossil fuels can exert significant influence over national politics and policy. For example, political observers have pointed out that Vice President Kamala Harris rarely mentioned the administration’s climate performance during the presidential campaign, instead repeating her pledge not to ban fracking, in part because of her victory in the swing state of Pennsylvania. They say it was a futile effort. , is the country’s second largest natural gas producer.
The current shape of U.S. climate policy has been determined by the political realities of the Senate. In the Senate, it is impossible to get the 66 votes needed to ratify an existing climate treaty or the 60 votes to pass any substantive climate legislation. The Obama administration helped design the Paris Agreement, which does not require Senate ratification because it contains no binding legal obligations. And the Biden administration’s climate bill, a package of incentives included in the spending bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, needed just a majority for passage (and only got one with Harris’ tie-breaking vote).
“The United States has always had a difficult time enacting climate policy,” said Daniel Raimi, a researcher who led the fossil fuel revenue study at RFF. “The Inflation Reduction Act was the exception rather than the rule, and it is also a very unique type of climate policy. Most countries in the rest of the world use carbon pricing or regulatory tools. “We couldn’t do anything else because of the political dynamics, so we took a grant-based approach.”
But now the Trump administration is trying to undo these policies. Trump’s job was made easier because the policy was not the product of a bipartisan consensus on climate action.
“I think it’s worth remembering that in the United States, this is not that unusual,” Raimi said. “Unfortunately, this is similar to where we have been for the past several decades.”
Fracking Since 2010, oil and gas have flooded US markets, laying the foundation for Trump’s ‘energy dominance’ agenda.
Trump likes to say that on his watch, the United States achieved energy independence and became a net exporter of energy for the first time in more than 60 years, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia in oil production in 2018 and the following year. But this trend began during the Obama era and accelerated under Biden, with the United States producing 12.9 million barrels of crude oil per day in 2023, more than any other country in history.
In recent years, large-scale facilities have been built to export liquefied natural gas (LNG). And in 2015, Congress lifted a 40-year-old ban on U.S. crude oil exports, responding to oil industry claims that the country needed to be able to compete with oil states for its own well-being. “Today’s vote puts us on the path to a new era of energy security,” American Petroleum Institute CEO Jack Gerrard said at the time. He said U.S. producers “will be able to compete on a level playing field with countries like Iran and Russia and provide security for our allies.”
Biden put this concept into practice after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, boosting LNG shipments to the European Union and undermining Russia’s role as a vital energy source for the continent. Over the past three years, the United States has provided half of the EU’s LNG supplies, helping the ally cope with a sharp decline in energy supplies from Russia.
Earlier this year, Biden paused approvals for new LNG ports while studies were conducted on greenhouse gas impacts, but a federal judge lifted the moratorium and Trump ended it entirely, potentially clearing the way for 20 proposed new LNG terminals. I opened it. Even if President Trump succeeds in ending the war in Ukraine ‘within 24 hours’ as he promised, LNG could play a larger role in foreign policy.
“It seems clear that a second Trump administration will want to use energy leverage to extract concessions from Europe on a variety of fronts,” Hendrix said. “We could either increase military spending, increase military spending allocated to U.S. arms exports, or generally provide more guarantees to purchase more U.S. exports.”
The EU may be ready for a deal. The day after the election, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen suggested that the EU could avoid the Trump tariffs by agreeing to buy more LNG from the United States.
majority Under the new Trump administration, the military may act against the interests of the oil and gas industry.
Other industries, such as automakers, which have invested billions of dollars in electric vehicles and battery factories in anticipation of a global clean energy transition, may succeed in delaying some of their planned regulatory rollbacks.
States with new clean energy projects or long-term efforts to combat climate change will have their voices heard. “We will continue to see tremendous, dynamic growth in the clean energy economy across America, state by state, county by county, city by city,” Washington Governor Jay Inslee said at a press conference after the meeting. election.
Environmentalists, landowners and fishing companies are already fighting in court over the construction of a new LNG terminal. Judges have ruled against three LNG projects so far this year, suggesting Trump won’t be able to build new ports on the Gulf Coast overnight.
And finally, some experts rightly acknowledge that Trump’s own vision of energy policy may be at odds with his own. Trump has often said he wants gas prices to return to the “beautiful number” of $1.87 per gallon of gas, where they bottomed in his final year in office.
However, gasoline prices were too low in 2020 as the global economy stalled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts say the price of crude oil, currently over $74 a barrel, would have to plummet to $20 a barrel, as it did in 2020, for pump prices to be that low. Then the “drill, baby, drill” may stop. ExxonMobil said its break-even point (the price of oil that can cover production costs) is $35 per barrel. Wells Fargo estimated last year that the breakeven point for companies fracking in U.S. shale basins was $54 per barrel.
The realities of free markets and democratic institutions may prevent the United States from slipping into the realm of petrostates. Nonetheless, the 2024 election has signaled to many how the abundance of fossil fuels has made the path toward climate action more difficult in the United States.
“Imagine the United States being as oil-poor as China,” Hendrix said. “There has probably been a continued emphasis on renewable energy since the 1990s, if not the 1980s.
“Instead, what we have is this kind of domestic political competition between a coalition that supports renewable energy and a coalition that supports fossil fuels,” he said. “And Trump’s election suggests to me that fossil fuels will be the winners in the short term.”
