With the United States oil and gas lobby set to dismantle climate regulations brought in by the Biden administration, a nail-biter of a national election next week will determine whether the U.S. industry moves into a new era of political dominance, secure in its ability to continue expanding production and boosting its emissions of climate-busting greenhouse gases.

“As clean energy begins to challenge the dominance of oil and gas, what some industry barons and their allies fear most is being perceived—by investors, policy-makers, and the public—as entering a state of terminal decline,” independent journalist Jonathan Mingle writes in a guest essay for the New York Times. “If Kamala Harris wins the presidency, she could hasten the arrival of that moment by pursuing policies and regulations that would lead to lower consumption of oil and gas.”

But if Donald Trump prevails in the November 5 vote, “the industry is betting he will slam the brakes on the clean energy transition, prolong demand for oil and gas, and help maintain the primacy of fossil fuels for decades to come.”

If a Trump victory provides the opportunity, the industry will be ready, the Washington Post reports, citing internal documents produced by the 30-member American Production and Exploration Council (APXC) and obtained by climate researchers at Fieldnotes.

“The lobbying blueprint takes particular aim at a new tax on emissions of methane, a gas that the International Energy Agency (IEA) says is responsible for nearly a third of human-caused global warming,” the Post writes. “The policy plans, contained in documents distributed to a wide group of company executives at AXPC board meetings in April and August, also call for a repeal of more than a half-dozen executive orders that lie at the centre of the Biden administration’s efforts to combat climate change.”

All in all, “the group’s goals amount to a monumental rollback of some of the most aggressive federal tools for cutting emissions,” along with measures “to unleash production and export of liquefied natural gas (LNG),” the Post states.

A ‘Breathtakingly Corrupt Proposal’

APXC says it’ll pursue the same policy agenda regardless of who wins the election. But “almost all the policies it targets for elimination and rewrite were enacted by the Biden administration,” the Post writes. Trump, by contrast, “has called climate change a hoax and signaled a willingness to embrace the industry’s agenda by pledging favourable policies as he urged fossil fuel companies to donate heavily to his campaign.”

In the Times, Mingle has a rather more direct take on that extraordinary moment. “When Donald Trump invited about 20 prominent oil and gas executives to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago in April, he made a breathtakingly corrupt proposal: If they raised a billion dollars to help him retake the White House, he would roll back any policy they didn’t like when he took office,” the independent journalist recalls. “Several fossil fuel companies and their executives have since answered his call with brio, becoming among the top donors to the Trump campaign and Trump-aligned super PACs,” political action committees that are allowed to collect unlimited contributions that they then aggregate and pass on to candidates and campaigns. [Pro tip: It didn’t have to be this way—Ed.]

At first glance, Mingle says, it isn’t clear why fossil companies would be so leery of a sitting government that allowed record domestic oil production over the last four years. “But if you take the long view, as these companies do, other policies of the Biden administration—which would probably be continued by a Harris administration—could pose a significant threat to their interests,” beginning with Biden’s late January pause on new LNG projects as an example.

“The industry is wary of an administration that may make climate imperatives a permanent fixture in the public interest equation. That’s why reversing the pause was reportedly one of executives’ top requests of Mr. Trump at their Mar-a-Lago meeting. An attendee told the Washington Post that he promised to give it to them on his first day in office.”

Oil and gas interests are also pushing back on the International Energy Agency’s forecasts over the last year that global demand for all three fossil fuels will peak before the end of this decade, giving way to a new Age of Electricity. “Why such a fuss? Because when the energy data agency says the world’s appetite for oil and gas could soon enter a period of permanent decline, investors pay close attention. When the Dutch bank giant ING recently announced it would cease financing upstream development of new oil and gas fields immediately and liquefied natural gas export terminals after 2025, it pointed to IEA’s forecasts as justification.”

Renewables Ascendant

While fossil companies join tech titan Elon Musk in trying to buy the election outcome they want, a new online dashboard published last week by the Environment America Research & Policy Center and Santa Barbara, California-based Frontier Group shows U.S. production of renewable electricity from solar, wind, and geothermal tripling over the last decade.

“The growth of renewable energy in America has exceeded even the sunniest expectations,” Johanna Neumann, senior director the Policy Center’s Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy, said in a release. “When we replace fossil fuels with wind turbines and solar panels, and curb wasteful uses of energy, we build a world where the planet and people can thrive.”

The two organizations report:

• 15 U.S. states producing 30% or more of their electricity from renewables, up from only two in 2014, with Texas, California, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas (four Republican-voting states out of five) in the lead;
• Battery storage up 97-fold since 2014 and 72% since the end of 2022, at 15.5 gigawatts;
• A 33-fold increase in solar in the southeastern U.S. over the last decade delivering enough electricity to power 4.6 million average U.S. homes.

“In 2024, with states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Iowa leading the way, repowering America with clean energy is a fully nation-wide project,” said Tony Dutzik, associate director and senior policy analyst at Frontier Group. “Solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and battery storage are benefitting people in all 50 states, providing the building blocks of a clean energy system free from dirty fossil fuels.”

Falling Demand = Lower Gas Prices

In one indirect but important way, the shift in demand from fossil fuels to renewable energy may be shaping one of the economic influences that are widely believed to sway large numbers of U.S. voters. Oil prices have “slipped more than 15% in the past year to around US$72 a barrel [last] Tuesday morning, as signs emerge that the world may soon have more crude than it needs,” the Times writes. “Oil production has been rising in the United States and elsewhere, while demand weakens in China, long a voracious consumer of fossil fuels.”

And on the home front, “Americans are consuming less gasoline than they used to. Between better energy efficiency and more electric and hybrid vehicles on the road, domestic consumption is about 4% lower than it was in 2019, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Many analysts doubt it will ever recover to pre-pandemic levels.”

All of which explains why, after wrestling with gas price spikes brought on largely by Russia’s war in Ukraine and the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, the U.S. is seeing prices approach or fall below $3 per gallon in most states, “returning to a national average not seen since February in one of the clearest examples of prices declining,” the Times says. Average prices last Tuesday stood at $3.16, an 11% drop from the same time last year, and swing states Georgia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin were all paying less than $3.

“That’s made filling up much more affordable than it typically is in the weeks before a presidential election,” the Times says. “Vice President Kamala Harris has sought to capitalize on the economic good news, taking credit for the drop in gasoline prices. The Biden administration’s decisions to sell fuel from a national reserve and relax certain gasoline-making rules have helped to lower prices, the White House has said.”

Trump is promising to send prices below $2 per gallon, but hasn’t said how he’ll do it, the news story states, and “many view his target as unrealistic”.

Gas prices could help tip the election because, “along with the cost of other staples like eggs and milk, the price of gasoline is frequently invoked by politicians and consumers alike as a barometer for the health of the economy and how Americans are faring financially,” the Times explains. “Gas prices have the added distinction of being prominently displayed almost everywhere, reminding drivers whether it’s more or less expensive to get to work or the grocery store.”