ICYMI: Oil Front Group Pre-Drafted Agenda for Trump’s Day One Dictatorship

The Washington Post: “Trump has vowed to gut climate rules. Oil lobbyists have a plan ready. As companies fall short on methane emission reductions, a top trade group has crafted a road map for dismantling key Biden administration rules.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. – This morning, The Washington Post reported that a Big Oil lobbying group has already drafted a list of executive orders for Donald Trump to sign or roll back at the start of his day one dictatorship. Trump followed up his $1 billion “request” to the group’s billionaire backers in April with a promise to immediately implement their agenda, and they’ve responded to his months of phone calls for cash by writing down exactly what they want him to do, for what are surely unrelated reasons. 

Climate Power’s Senior Advisor for Oil and Gas Alex Witt issued the following statement: “Big Oil wrote down Trump’s agenda for him, and he’ll put pen to paper to hand them a payout because he knows they’ve spent months signing his checks.”

The Washington Post: Trump has vowed to gut climate rules. Oil lobbyists have a plan ready.

An influential oil and gas industry group whose members were aggressively pursued for campaign cash by Donald Trump has drafted detailed plans for dismantling landmark Biden administration climate rules after the presidential election, according to internal documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The plans were drawn up by the American Exploration and Production Council, or AXPC, a group of 30 mostly independent oil and gas producers, including several major oil companies. They reveal a comprehensive industry effort to reverse climate initiatives advanced during nearly four years of Democratic leadership. At the same time, the documents contain confidential data showing that industry’s voluntary initiatives to cut emissions have fallen short…

While AXPC says it would pursue the rollbacks regardless of who wins the November election, almost all the policies it targets for elimination and rewrite were enacted by the Biden administration. Trump has called climate change a hoax and signaled a willingness to embrace the industry’s agenda by pledging favorable policies as he urged fossil fuel companies to donate heavily to his campaign…

The emergence of the AXPC plans follows a spring dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, during which the former president vowed to reverse the energy transition and call off federal regulators, according to people who attended. Executives from ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and three other AXPC companies were on the list of attendees that was provided by a Trump adviser.

At the gathering, Trump told industry executives that their best shot at a rewrite of climate policies that inhibit fossil fuel production would be to raise $1 billion to help propel him back into office.

Trump has repeatedly called oil executives in the months after the dinner, to hear their wishes and raise campaign cash, according to an executive familiar with the calls. At the dinner at Mar-a-Lago, executives raised concerns with Trump — some of which are in the AXPC document — but did not present him with any draft executive orders or written plans, according to an attendee. 

At a donor roundtable in Houston in the summer, according to a person who was in attendance, oil executives told Trump that he needed to push for the IEA to replace its leader with one who would be less focused on climate change and more supportive of fossil fuel development…

Under the AXPC plan, executive orders central to the Biden administration’s climate effort would be revoked or rewritten. One, titled “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” is an expansive initiative that reoriented the entire federal government toward confronting climate change, including making the nation’s power grid carbon emissions-free by 2035, eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels, and limiting drilling on federal land.”