Oil baron with Trump's ear crusades against 'parasitic' renewable energy: analysis

An oil baron is fighting renewable energy production by influencing fellow billionaire Donald Trump, a New York Times opinion piece warned Monday.

Fracking pioneer Harold Hamm earned a considerable fortune in fossil fuels and is not willing to watch renewable energy — produced by wind, solar, and hydropower — take a bite out of his profits, according to energy writer Russell Gold. Hamm's privately held company is the 13th-largest oil producer in the United States, raking in $2 billion in profits last year, the article said.

Hamm began his campaign against the "parasitic" wind industry in Oklahoma in 2016, about the same time he endorsed Trump's first presidential campaign. Since then, Hamm "has taken his fight against renewables national — and made a project out of influencing President Trump," the article says.

The article laid out how Hamm's “energy round table” he arranged for Trump at Mar-a-Lago last April with about 20 energy executives led to Trump "bluntly" asking for $1 billion in donations from the oil industry and "promising to roll back regulations." The industry became a "major financial backer of Mr. Trump’s campaign," the article said, with Hamm donating more than $4 million to political action committees supporting Trump.

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"Mr. Hamm’s allies now hold key posts in the administration; among them is Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who delivered an uncompromising defense of fossil fuels in a recent speech in Houston," Gold writes. For his part, Wright has called climate change "a mere 'side effect' of building a modern world with longer life expectancy and 'lifting almost all of the world’s citizens out of grinding poverty.'"

Together, Hamm and Wright are "shaping a policy of fossil fuels above all else that would benefit Mr. Hamm and other domestic oil producers," the article says.

Gold writes that the question facing America is "how to balance responding to climate change with powering the economy in the coming years," arguing that a return to the old ways "only risks the future."

For Hamm, the article said, the only acceptable answer is a return to the energy system of the early 2000s, "in which wind and solar energy were insignificant, and natural gas was becoming dominant, alongside nuclear."

Read The New York Times opinion piece here.