Leading
coal, oil and gas CEOs and some industry lobbyists are channeling
millions of dollars to help Trump win in 2020,
Robert
Murray, a coal magnate hosted a fundraising dinner this July in West
Virginia that hauled in an estimated $2.5m for the president’s
re-election coffers. Murray and his eponymous Murray Energy, the
nation’s largest privately owned coal company, also has contributed
$1m to a Pac that helps push Trump’s energy agenda. Murray,
a prominent climate change denier who has ridiculed widely accepted
climate change science as “theology” and “politics”, gave the
Trump administration a 14-point “action plan” on 1 March 2017
that included killing Obama’s clean power regulations. Murray
himself was at EPA headquarters in March 2017 when Trump signed an
executive order telling the then EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, to
start dismantling Obama’s Clean Power plan.
Texas
lobbyist Jeff Miller, who has several big fossil fuel clients and ran
energy secretary Rick Perry’s 2016 presidential campaign, raised
about $1m in this year’s second quarter for the Trump Victory
Committee. Miller, who rounded up $1m in just this year’s second
quarter for the Trump campaign, also served as a vice-finance chair
of Trump’s inaugural.
Kelcy
Warren who heads Energy
Transfer, a Texas firm that constructed the controversial Dakota
Access pipeline project which in early 2017 got a green light when
the army approved a final permit for building it. Warren,
who donated $300,000 to Trump’s inaugural, in the second quarter of
2019 chipped in the maximum $360,000 to Trump’s Victory Committee
Robert
Maguire, research director at Crew which monitors ethics issues,
explained, “While coal, oil and gas interests generously fill
President Trump’s war chest, his administration gives them
something that’s arguably even more valuable: former industry
lobbyists in positions of power at agencies that impact their bottom
line, and a deregulatory agenda that reads like a wishlist written by
the fossil fuel industry.”
Jerry
Taylor, who heads the nonpartisan Niskanen Center, said that fossil
fuel companies may have more clout than ever with Trump in office.
“It’s hard to identify any industrial sector that has ever had
this much success with any
administration in modern history. The fossil fuels industry has
gotten nearly every single last item on its wishlist from the Trump
administration.”
Other
coal industry titans like billionaire Joe Craft, the CEO of the
nation’s third-largest coal company Alliance Resource Partners,
have been riding high in the Trump era. Craft and his wife Kelly
Knight Craft, both native Kentuckians with close ties to the Senate
majority leader, Mitch McConnell, donated a total of $2m to Trump
campaign coffers and the inaugural committee.
Likewise
the oil and gas billionaire Harold Hamm, who is CEO of Continental
Resources and touted Trump’s credentials at the GOP convention in
mid 2016, donated $50,000 in this year’s second quarter to Trump’s
Victory Committee. Hamm was also one of an elite group of fossil fuel
CEOs who wrote big checks to both the inaugural and to outside Pacs
that have been instrumental in backing Trump’s deregulatory agenda.
Hamm and his company donated $1m to both the inaugural, and another
$1m to one of several Pacs that have promoted Trump’s energy
policies.
According
to a 2018 Public Citizen study, energy industry donors of at least
$100,000 gave a total of $8.3m to six outside groups promoting Trump
policies from early 2017 through mid-October last year, putting the
energy sector right behind gambling and real estate as leading
backers of Trump’s policies.
Don
Duncan, formerly ConocoPhillips’ top lobbyist, notes that Trump
pledges to drain Washington’s influence swamps seem to have
fizzled. “Trump hasn’t drained the swamp, he’s just filled it
with more alligators.”
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