Trump is Doing Big Oil’s Bidding
U.S. carmakers, autoworkers and the general public will pay the price
Presidential candidate Donald Trump dined on chopped steak with oil industry executives at Mar-a-Lago in April 2024, shaking them down for $1 billion in campaign contributions. In return, he told them he would kill off electric vehicles, clean energy and other protections they oppose. Although he didn’t get all of the $1 billion, the CEOs ultimately contributed $445 million to Trump and his allies in Congress.
It's no secret that Trump is transactional. But there’s a startling rawness to how he’s rewarding the oil and gas industry. We are now witnessing one of the greatest payoffs in U.S. history.
Since Trump took office, he has fabricated an energy emergency to justify more drill baby drilling in unspoiled places. And he appointed an industry-friendly climate science denier to run the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and “oiligarchs” to helm the Interior and Energy departments. All are enthusiastically implementing their shared retrograde vision.
Trump’s EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, is preparing to wield the administration’s most damaging attack on the climate by rolling back federal clean car standards, having already bashed California’s historic authority to set its own tailpipe pollution rules, which are followed by more than a dozen other states. Zeldin recently did an illegal end run around proper, public rulemaking procedures to try to repeal California’s decades-old jurisdiction.
The Biden EPA’s auto pollution rule has saved American drivers $62 billion annually on fuel and will cut 7 billion tons of heat-trapping carbon pollution over the life of the vehicles. That makes oil industry CEOs very unhappy. Reducing fuel consumption takes a big bite out of their profits. In May, the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, which represents Chevron, ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, Marathon Petroleum and other oil and gas giants, launched a $6.6 million advertising blitz attacking the rules.
Adding injury to insult, Congress passed—and Trump signed—a provision inviting automakers to cheat on the Transportation Department’s gas-saving corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards by cutting the penalties for violations to zero.
In another major victory for Big Oil, the EPA is preparing to make it more difficult for the federal government to address the climate crisis by revoking its key scientific “endangerment finding.” This determination underpins vehicle tailpipe standards and many other climate rules. Joining the Flat Earth Society on climate is one thing, but convincing even conservative judges to ignore established science that has determined that carbon emissions threaten public health and the environment is another. Polluting industries have challenged the endangerment finding in dozens of courts and failed each time.
The clean car standards Trump is targeting are the biggest single step any nation has taken to cut oil consumption, reduce climate-damaging pollution, and save consumers billions of dollars at the pump—and automakers already have the technology to meet them. The cheapest way for the companies to meet them, according to the EPA, is by ramping up electric vehicle (EV) production to 50 percent of their new fleets by 2030. This was always a goal, not an “EV mandate” as the oil industry and Trump have falsely claimed.
Importantly, the new standards have worked. Today’s new vehicle fleet is the cleanest, most efficient ever, and the standards, along with the EV tax credit and federal support for charger installation, resulted in a jump in clean car sales. Trump and his minions have targeted them all for rapid disassembly.
Killing stricter tailpipe standards and undermining EV production may bolster oil industry profits, but they will hurt U.S. automakers by making them less competitive. U.S. car companies likely will make fewer clean vehicles, as they did when Trump squashed EPA rules during his first term. Foreign car manufacturers—especially Chinese auto companies—will capture international markets. In 2024, Chinese automaker BYD’s sales grew while Elon Musk’s Tesla sales slowed. BYD sold 4.27 million EVs and plug-in hybrids. By comparison, Americans bought 16 million cars last year—90 percent of which were gas-powered. If U.S. companies fail to compete, Chinese automakers will eat their lunch.
Can anything stop the Trump kleptocracy’s pernicious assault on clean car rules?
The courts will likely rein him in, given his lawless approach, though few have so far. In the long term, however, the key will be for the American people to understand that Trump’s reckless regulatory rollbacks will increase gas guzzling, undermine U.S. automakers’ global competitiveness, kill autoworker jobs, and cost drivers billions at the pump. More smog-forming pollution will sicken children with asthma. Extra heat-trapping carbon emissions will stoke a warming climate, exacerbating wildfires, droughts, floods and heat waves.
Trump’s poll numbers are already faltering. A growing number of Americans realize he’s abusing his power, and that includes putting payoffs to his oil industry donors ahead of the public interest. The more obvious that becomes, the angrier voters will get.
Daniel F. Becker is director of the Center for Biological Diversity's Safe Climate Transport Campaign. Maya Golden-Krasner is the deputy director of the center's Climate Law Institute.
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