While the president and his Department of War struggle to articulate a justification for bombing Iran, the evidence for one powerful motivation is overwhelming.
It’s a juicy payoff to Trump’s fossil fuel industry pals.
While it seems a lifetime ago, during the 2024 campaign Trump reportedly met with key fossil fuel industry leaders to promise them handsome rewards if they would contribute $1 billion to his presidential campaign coffers and those of PACs created to get him elected.
Though it’s impossible to know if the $1 billion goal was reached given the lack of transparency surrounding contributions to political action committees, the payoffs already have been prodigious — even by the standards of an industry renowned for motherlodes and gushers.
Over the objections of the nation’s automakers, Trump, on his first day in office, reversed Biden’s executive order calling for 50% of all autos sold in the U.S. after 2030 to be electric vehicles. Then, in case his O&G buddies didn’t feel the full measure of his largesse, he went to work to eliminate fuel efficiency standards for vehicles so he could guarantee drivers would have to buy more gasoline.
The message: motorists be damned.
By cutting funds for clean energy programs and slow-walking approval of wind and solar projects, the administration has frustrated the development of renewable energy across the country despite the fact that the power it generates is cheaper.
Then in an audacious gift to the fossil fuel goons, Trump paid a French energy developer nearly $1 billion to drop its plan to build wind farms off the East Coast and instead develop more oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico.
For Republicans who have long preached the gospel of free-market economies, Trump’s wholesale manipulation of the energy market surely requires a reality check — or at least an extreme degree of magical thinking.
The U.S. is an outlier in its irrational protections for dirty, expensive, outmoded fossil fuel technologies. Wind power is Germany’s largest source of electricity, and solar installations are estimated to triple worldwide by 2035, with the petrostate of Saudi Arabia among the biggest investors in the technology.
The message: ratepayers be damned.
One of the most cynical and destructive payoffs to the industry is the order from Trump’s EPA reversing the finding that greenhouse gas emissions are causing climate change and endangering human health and the environment. The order eviscerated the government’s ability to control pollution.
Add to that the administration’s demands that operators of dirty, expensive, obsolete coal-fired power plants keep them running no matter how much it costs, and it’s obvious the fossil fuel industry is getting a monstrous return on its investment in electing an ignorant dinosaur to run the country.
Tri-State Generation, an owner of the 47-year-old Craig 1 coal-fired plant, has said it will cost $80 million to operate the plant for a year. It was scheduled to be decommissioned in December, but operators have been ordered by Trump’s Energy Department to keep it burning — even though it’s entirely unnecessary.
“It is time for the administration to stand down and allow this unit to retire as utilities and state regulators had long planned,” Leslie Coleman, senior attorney with Earthjustice’s Rocky Mountain Office, told Sun reporter Michael Booth.
No one wants this “aging and unreliable” unit to keep operating “except the coal industry,” she said.
Owners of Craig 1 further object to keeping the unit burning because it would force coal power on the transmission lines instead of the clean power being generated by the 145MW Axial Basin solar farm in nearby Moffat County.
So, dirty, expensive, unreliable energy will replace clean power in northwestern Colorado over the objections of, well, everybody.
The message: any creature that breathes be damned.
Ahhh, but all those promoters of dirty energy are livin’ large.
The oil and gas industry raked in $18 billion in tax incentives from the administration last year. And since the war in Iran started in February, investment analysts have revised upward their forecasts for profits in volatile oil industry stocks.
That’s inevitable when gasoline prices top $4 a gallon.
Meanwhile, shareholders in coal mining were delusional when they thought Trump would resuscitate their industry.
Investment analysts warn that its moment for government-imposed coal production likely will be brief since the industry has been in freefall for more than 15 years and high costs will discourage investment by anyone who can read a spreadsheet.
No matter how much the industry invested in the Trump campaign juggernaut, there is only so much the president can do to keep an overpriced 19th-century technology on life-support.
But his ability to wreck the global economy, the world order and the planet is boundless. And his co-conspirators in the fossil fuel industry are profiteering from it every step of the way.
Diane Carman is a Denver communications consultant.
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