‘Swampy symbiosis’: fossil fuel industry has more clout than ever under Trump

Robert Murray, a coal magnate who forged ties in 2016 with Donald Trump as he championed reviving the beleaguered coal industry, hosted a fundraising dinner this July in West Virginia that hauled in an estimated $2.5m for the president’s re-election coffers.

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, campaign filings show.

The stellar fundraising by figures like Murray and Miller highlight an early spurt of fossil fuel backing for Trump’s re-election as his campaign gears up, according to analysts and campaign finance reports.

Leading coal, oil and gas CEOs and some industry lobbyists are ponying up millions of dollars to help Trump win in 2020, after reaping a regulatory windfall that has benefited some of their bottom lines during Trump’s first term.

However, many of these pro-fossil fuel victories came via executive orders and regulatory actions and could be reversed if a Democrat wins in 2020 – perhaps showing why the fossil fuel industry is backing Trump’s re-election so aggressively.

While a few of Trump’s biggest fossil fuel backers wrote six figure checks to his campaign and allied super Pacs in 2016, their wallets opened much wider after Trump won, giving millions of dollars to his inaugural committee, and to independent groups promoting Trump’s deregulatory agenda.

Trump’s drive to boost fossil fuels by slashing regulations includes: withdrawing from the landmark 2015 Paris climate change accord which 195 countries signed to help reduce rising global temperatures; ending the Obama administration’s Clean Power rules to curb coal-fired power plant emissions; and sharply limiting an Obama-era regulation aimed at reducing methane emissions, an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Watchdog groups are dismayed at the influence fossil fuel bigwigs have received from the Trump administration which tapped two former energy lobbyists to run the Environmental Protection Agency and interior department.

“There is a certain swampy symbiosis to it all,” said Robert Maguire, research director at Crew which monitors ethics issues. “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.”

Similarly, 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.”

Still, Taylor noted that energy company wins could be short-lived. “Given that most of these policy gifts were achieved via executive order or regulatory action, they can all be undone rather quickly by a Democratic administration.”

Which helps explain why fossil fuel interests seem to be moving early and with gusto to fill Trump campaign coffers, on top of writing other big checks since Trump’s election to outside groups that are promoting deregulatory agendas.

Besides Murray and Miller, other early big Trump energy donors include 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, the joint fundraising effort of the campaign and the RNC, according to campaign filings.

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, according to public filings.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kelly Craft was confirmed this summer to be US ambassador to the United Nations, becoming the first big donor to hold that post. Craft agreed to recuse herself from discussions about climate change and coal because of her husband’s company.

Some key Trump backers who lobby for fossil fuel clients are faring well too.

Miller, the Texas lobbyist 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.

Boasting a blue chip list of fossil fuel clients including Kelcy Warren’s Energy Transfer Partners, Southern Company and Occidental Petroleum, Miller’s firm has experienced a healthy uptick in clients since Trump’s election.

And Miller has reportedly met with the president on some energy issues, plus his old boss, energy secretary Perry. “If you want to get to Rick Perry, you go to Miller,” said one veteran GOP Texas donor.

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.”