You may have heard of this already, where Trump casually promised a quid pro quo to the oil industry that would let them rape and pillage the environment at will. Even for Trump, this was stunning. Via the Washington Post:
As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.
Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.
Trump’s remarkably blunt and transactional pitch reveals how the former president is targeting the oil industry to finance his reelection bid. At the same time, he has turned to the industry to help shape his environmental agenda for a second term, including rollbacks of some of Biden’s signature achievements on clean energy and electric vehicles.
Transactional enough that activist non-profits are examining whether he met the standards for a bribery charge. Not that that's happening before the election, of course.
No, what's really astounding about this is how many MAGAts will agree with him. We're well above the average for tornados this spring, but it's more than that. They're more powerful, they're closer together, and they're doing more damage.
What do they think is causing all these storms and floods? Think harder, people. Maybe the smart people who study these things know more than you do.
Fortunately (and I can't believe I'm saying this), even the oil industry itself knows the boom times are over. As much as they bitch about Biden's regulations, they know it's inevitable.
