ICYMI: New York Times: Candidate Trump Promised Oil Executives a Windfall. Now, They’re Getting It.

Washington, D.C. – The New York Times reports that Donald Trump is making good on his promise to boost the bottom line of his billionaire Big Oil campaign donors. Trump’s new Republican Rate Hike bill is forcing working families to pay higher energy costs to fund tax breaks for the ultrawealthy fossil fuel executives who backed him last year. 

The New York Times: Candidate Trump Promised Oil Executives a Windfall. Now, They’re Getting It.

During the presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump gathered oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago estate and promised them a powerful return on their investment if they raised $1 billion to help him retake the White House.

The industry never ponied up quite that much, but nevertheless, six months into Mr. Trump’s presidency, oil and gas companies are poised to reap multibillion-dollar windfalls from the administration’s actions so far.

A sweeping domestic policy bill that Mr. Trump signed into law this month includes about $18 billion in new and expanded tax incentives for the oil and gas industry, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, which analyzes tax policy for Congress. It also includes billions of dollars in tax breaks that aren’t specific to oil and gas but were top oil industry priorities as the law was being negotiated.

It reduces the amount of money that energy companies must pay the federal government for the oil and gas they extract on public lands and waters, a change valued at about $6 billion, according to one analysis. The bill also delays penalties for oil companies that fail to reduce emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that leaks from wells, representing about $1.5 billion in benefits for the industry, the Congressional Budget Office found.

“The final bill was positive for us across all of our top priorities,” said Aaron Padilla, the vice president of corporate policy at the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s chief lobbying organization.

The benefits for fossil fuels comes as the Trump administration is systematically eliminating federal policies to combat climate change, including this week’s extraordinary move to revoke the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific justification for regulating greenhouse gases. That move would essentially kill one of the government’s main tools for cutting emissions from power-plant smokestacks, oil and gas wells and automobile tailpipes.

The administration has also been cutting funding for climate research and rolling back programs designed to help millions of Americans prepare for rising sea levels, deadlier heat waves, increasingly intense wildfires and other effects of global warming…

Last Friday, Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, introduced legislation that would repeal what his staff has calculated as more than $190 billion over 10 years in tax benefits and subsidies for the industry, including those in the new law. He cited an analysis by Climate Power, an environmental group, that found the oil industry had spent $450 million on a combination of donations, lobbying and advertising during the 2024 election cycle. A New York Times analysis found that the oil industry and related interests made $75 million in direct donations to Mr. Trump and his campaign committees.