By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 24, 2025 ~
Donald Trump and Charles Koch
On October 21, 2020, during Donald Trump’s first term as President, former President Barack Obama delivered a speech at a Democratic campaign rally in Philadelphia. During the remarks, Obama got to the core of how the fossil fuel industry had shaped the Trump administration. He stated:
“The Environmental Protection Agency, that’s supposed to protect our air and our water, is right now run by an energy lobbyist that gives polluters free reign to dump unlimited poison into our air and water…
“The Interior Department, that’s supposed to protect our public lands and wild spaces, our wildlife and our wilderness. And right now, that’s run by an oil lobbyist who’s determined to sell them to the highest bidder.”
During Trump’s first term, the fossil fuels industry and particularly Charles Koch, Chairman and CEO of the fossil fuels conglomerate, Koch Industries, were brazen in their control of the Trump agenda.
In November of 2017, the respected watchdog, Public Citizen, reported that 44 Koch allies were staffing the White House and other agencies. And as we reported at Wall Street On Parade, that’s on top of the 12 lawyers from Jones Day, Koch Industries’ long-time outside law firm, who took their seats in the Trump administration on January 20, 2017 – the day of Trump’s inauguration.
Trump had barely sat down at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office when a Koch front group, Freedom Partners, issued a list of regulations it wanted gutted – like the Paris Climate accord (which Trump revoked on June 1, 2017) and numerous EPA rules – and threatened those lawmakers who didn’t get on board, writing that “Freedom Partners will hold lawmakers who oppose regulatory relief accountable for their positions.” That meant that they would run a challenger against them in the next Republican primary.
Two other nonprofits that actively engaged in the 2016 presidential election were Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners Action Fund. Not only did the Koch network fund Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners Action Fund to run ads portraying Democrats as reckless tax and spend bureaucrats but the Koch-controlled i360 voter database and voter-targeting operations may have tipped the scales in voter turnout.
This time around, the fossil fuel industry has tried to hide in the background and make it appear to the public that all those Executive Orders from Donald Trump in subservience to their industry are a mandate from his followers.
The reality that the fossil fuel industry is again cracking the whip in Trump 2.0 is underscored by the fact that Trump took more than four months to announce the U.S. was withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord in his first term. In Trump 2.0, he signed an Executive Order to that effect on his first day in office, along with a slew of other shocking giveaways to Big Oil.
During Trump’s inaugural speech on January 20, he said: “We will drill, baby, drill. We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have – the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it. We’re going to use it.”
Trump then issued an Executive Order on day one declaring a state of emergency on energy, which carried this dangerous directive:
“The heads of executive departments and agencies (‘agencies’) shall identify and exercise any lawful emergency authorities available to them, as well as all other lawful authorities they may possess, to facilitate the identification, leasing, siting, production, transportation, refining, and generation of domestic energy resources, including, but not limited to, on Federal lands. If an agency assesses that use of either Federal eminent domain authorities or authorities afforded under the Defense Production Act (Public Law 81-774, 50 U.S.C. 4501 et seq.) are necessary to achieve this objective, the agency shall submit recommendations for a course of action to the President, through the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.”
At the time of this Executive Order, there was no energy emergency in the U.S. but there was clearly a climate emergency as thousands of homes were lying in smoldering ruins in the second largest city in America – Los Angeles.
Another day one Executive Order seeks to open up highly controversial areas of Alaska to fossil fuel exploration. It reads in part:
“It is the policy of the United States to:
“(a) fully avail itself of Alaska’s vast lands and resources for the benefit of the Nation and the American citizens who call Alaska home;
“(b) efficiently and effectively maximize the development and production of the natural resources located on both Federal and State lands within Alaska;
“(c) expedite the permitting and leasing of energy and natural resource projects in Alaska; and
“(d) prioritize the development of Alaska’s liquified natural gas (LNG) potential, including the sale and transportation of Alaskan LNG to other regions of the United States and allied nations within the Pacific region….”
Another order directs the Environmental Protection Agency to revisit its finding that climate change poses a health risk and should be regulated.
Not only did Trump’s day one Executive Orders boost the fossil fuel industry but they brazenly constrained renewable energy. One executive order barred the U.S. government from auctioning the rights to build wind farms offshore and also temporarily blocked new rights for wind on public lands. Trump also directed the U.S. Department of the Interior to halt the construction of a wind farm in Idaho that was previously approved under President Biden.
These orders come at a dangerous time for the fossil fuel industry in America – which might explain this overt coup d’etat in the Executive Branch. Dozens of state and local lawsuits have been filed against fossil fuel companies, some by the Attorneys General of the states, and are now inching closer to trial.
According to bombshell testimony delivered to a House Committee in 2019 by Sharon Eubanks, the former Director of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Tobacco Litigation Team, not only has ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies known for decades that fossil fuels have put the planet on a catastrophic course, but they engaged in the same type of RICO conspiracy as Big Tobacco to hide this information from the American people.
Eubanks served as lead counsel in the federal government’s racketeering case against the tobacco industry, which played out in 2004 and 2005 in the federal courtroom of Judge Gladys Kessler in the District Court in Washington, D.C.
Eubanks told House Committee members the following on October 23, 2019 – during Trump’s first term in office:
“For more than 50 years, major fossil fuel companies have known that the unabated production and use of their products was contributing to the warming of the planet. This knowledge notwithstanding, individually and through trade associations, law firms, public relations firms, think tanks, and politicians, they financed a sophisticated campaign of denial and actively conspired to deny the threat that they helped to create and knew existed. They also lobbied against policies that would curtail greenhouse gas pollution and investment in alternative energy sources that could have reduced climate dangers. These intentional delays have cost precious time and made the impact of climate change far more dangerous and expensive than it would have been had we begun tackling it a generation ago…
“Exxon and other fossil fuel companies and allied corporate interest groups knew about the threat of climate change much earlier than we previously thought. Internal company and trade association documents demonstrate that the oil industry, Exxon in particular, had a deep understanding of the science of global warming some forty years ago. This knowledge extended not only to the warming potential of carbon dioxide — a pollutant emitted through the use of the industry’s primary product — and the clear link between increasing CO2 levels and fossil fuel combustion, but in their own words, to the ‘potentially catastrophic’ impacts that global warming would have on a ‘substantial portion’ of the Earth’s population.
“Beginning in the late 1980s, the fossil fuel industry created and spearheaded arguably the most successful social influence campaign in American history, building a climate denial, deception, and propaganda machine so persuasive that the United States remains, to this day, the only industrialized nation on Earth whose lawmakers fail to fully accept climate science. The denial and disinformation campaigns expanded as international negotiations pushed toward the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Industry scientists actively participated in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (‘IPCC’) process and reported back to their employers and funders. This insider information helped to inform strategies to create public ‘uncertainly’ about climate change.
“In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute (‘API’) produced its ‘Global Climate Science Communications Plan,’ which was designed and developed by representatives from Exxon, Chevron, and electric utility Southern Company, along with executives from conservative and libertarian organizations. The plan included a multi-million dollar, multi-year budget to instill ‘uncertainty’ about climate change in the public policy arena and stated, ‘Victory will be achieved when average citizens understand uncertainties in climate science…’ The report detailed target audiences, including media, policy makers and specifically teachers…
“In the years after this plan was leaked and exposed, it appears to have been implemented — a coalition of climate denying organizations, funded through the years by ExxonMobil, American Petroleum Institute, the Koch brothers, the Mercer family and other dark money contributors, have effectively stalled the implementation of prudent climate policy….”
Eubanks drew direct parallels to how Big Oil’s disinformation campaign was following in the footsteps of Big Tobacco. She testified as follows:
“Many of these same tactics were employed by Big Tobacco. The cigarette makers pre-emptively sued the attorneys general of Massachusetts, Alaska and other states that were considering suing them for knowingly and deceptively marketing an addictive, deadly product, hoping to stop the lawsuits. Similarly, ExxonMobil’s political allies in Congress subpoenaed the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts in an attempt to block their investigations into climate-related wrongdoing. But it did not stop there. ExxonMobil also sued the New York attorney general in a friendly Texas forum in another effort to derail the New York investigation. It has subpoenaed lawyers who it believes provided information and assistance to the attorneys general, and accused them and law enforcement officials of an extra-legal conspiracy to destroy them. In the case of both tobacco and fossil fuels, their efforts ultimately failed to prevent the states from moving ahead, but valuable time was lost.”
You can read Eubanks’ full testimony here, which includes explosive internal documents at the end. (If this document disappears from this congressional website, we have downloaded it for you here.)
A lot of the craziness coming out of the Trump administration is intentional to make a lot of confusing bold headlines, to keep the American people running in circles protesting one outrage to another, while the fossil fuel industry and Charles Koch smile in satisfaction at the chaos, and continue to “drill, baby, drill.”
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