Hertsgaard, Mark
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Trump’s reported $1 billion pitch to oil executives is a massive corruption that has been overlooked, according to a new analysis that accuses politicians and the media of ignoring an alleged pay-to-play arrangement that has delivered major benefits to the fossil fuel industry.
Writing in The New Republic on Monday, climate journalist Mark Hertsgaard said Trump’s pre-2024 election promises to oil executives are getting too little attention now that his administration is pursuing the industry’s agenda.
Hertsgaard described it as “one of the most overt and consequential examples of Trump’s pay-to-play behavior.”
According to a Washington Post report, the pay-to-play call to action occurred during dinner at Mar-a-Lago in April 2024, where Trump privately urged oil executives to raise $1 billion for his presidential campaign.
Trump reportedly called the proposed arrangement a good “deal,” offering tax breaks and fewer regulations in return once he got back to office.
Trump promised to reverse President Joe Biden’s pause on new liquefied natural gas export permits, expand oil drilling in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, and roll back emissions regulations. The Post later reported that Trump also offered to ease federal scrutiny of oil industry mergers.
Hertsgaard argued that Trump has since delivered on those promises, and pointed out how fossil industry players are raking in billions as a result.
A Brennan Center for Justice analysis found that oil and gas interests gave at least $75 million to Trump's 2024 campaign as well as affiliated PACs. Oil money also went to Trump’s political operation when he got back to the White House. The reported numbers is far below the $1 billion Trump reportedly wanted from the oil executives, but what they donated has gotten them numerous benefits from the administration.
Trump’s signature legislative package delivered $18 billion in tax incentives to fossil fuel companies, according to the Brennan Center. His administration also reversed the LNG permitting pause and rolled back the greenhouse gas emission rules.
Hertsgaard questioned why the Democrats and the media have paid little attention despite numerous polls pointing to voters' concerns about corruption.
A September Economist/YouGov poll found that 53 percent of respondents described Trump as “corrupt,” while 23 percent called him “honest.” A Fox News poll also found that 60% of respondents are extremely concerned about corruption in the Trump administration.
The columnist argued that journalists should follow the money from the campaign donation requests to the Trump administration decisions
The $1 billion figure points to solicitation rather than requests fulfilled. However, Hertsgaard’s central argument is that the oil industry-friendly policies Trump has enacted following the request should be looked at more closely.
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With the U.S. midterm elections less than three weeks away, is it any surprise that corruption has emerged as voters’ top concern? “Corrupt” was the adjective most often chosen when registered voters were asked for a single word to describe President Donald Trump, according to a survey conducted in September by The Economist and the market research firm YouGov, with 53 percent of respondents calling Trump “corrupt” and only 23 percent saying he is “honest.” A Pew Research Center poll in early October found that nearly seven in 10 (69 percent) of Americans are “not confident” that Trump keeps his business interests separate from his presidential decisions.
Americans can thank diligent investigative reporting for alerting them to much of the self-dealing by Trump, his family, and aides. For example, The Washington Post has reported that Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, were investors in 15 companies that “collectively generated at least $3.2 billion in direct government business since the sons invested and an additional $3.1 billion in future contract options.” On Tuesday, in a rare retreat, the White House asked Kimberly Guilfoyle to resign as U.S. ambassador to Greece after a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that Guilfoyle promised political favors to a Trump donor if he would quietly pay off her $100,000 American Express credit card bill.
Throughout the history of modern polling, voters have usually ranked the economy (or its proxies, such as “the cost of living”) as their top issue. Now, linking corruption with the cost of living, “Democrats Are Making Corruption Messaging a Pocketbook Issue,” a recent Politico headline declared. The Democrats’ claim, The New York Times reported, “is that rampant corruption in Congress and the administration is directly costing average citizens who are paying more for necessities like groceries, gas, and medicine.”
Both Democrats and the press, however, so far, are overlooking one of the most overt and consequential examples of Trump’s pay-to-play behavior. On May 24, 2024, Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow of The Washington Post published a blockbuster exposé, reporting that Trump privately told a group of oil company CEOs they should donate $1 billion to his 2024 presidential campaign. It would be a good “deal” for the industry, Trump reportedly said, because of the tax and regulation benefits they would receive if he returned to the Oval Office.
Specifically, Trump reportedly said he would reverse the Biden administration’s pause on new liquefied natural gas, or LNG, export permits, approve more drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, and roll back environmental regulations the industry didn’t like, including electric vehicle purchasing mandates and vehicle emissions limits. Dawsey and Joselow then published a follow-up, reporting that Trump also promised to soften Federal Trade Commission scrutiny of industry mergers and acquisitions.
Two and a half years later, his administration has delivered on each of these promises and then some. The Brennan Center has published a well-documented summary of Trump’s assault on climate policy—including his administration’s repeal of the “endangerment finding,” which granted the federal government the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions—that connects the dots between Trump’s actions and the many billions of dollars the oil industry has reaped as a result, including many millions of dollars benefiting oil executives as individuals.
What makes all this relevant to the midterm elections—beyond the fact that the leader of the Republican Party is directly implicated—is that many of Trump’s accomplishments were only possible because of rubber-stamp support from Republicans in Congress. Now those same Republicans must face the voters. How will they explain themselves?
To be clear, Democrats don’t get a pass here; corruption has been part of politics forever, and one of the press’s central obligations is to expose and hold its perpetrators to account, whoever they may be. That requires following the facts where they lead. But it also requires challenging the practice, still common among old-school newsrooms, of false equivalence—of portraying both sides as equally culpable for a given transgression for fear that an accurate portrayal would look like “taking sides.” If most of the facts point in one direction, our reporting should have the integrity and courage to say so.
Most voters don’t have access to directly question candidates seeking their votes. It’s our job as journalists to ask questions on their behalf so they can make informed decisions about their leaders.
Corruption is understandably a hot issue these days. Meanwhile, new scientific analysis from the nonprofit Climate Central shows that every congressional district in the country is hotter than it was in 1970, thanks to climate change. No surprise, then, that polling also shows that the vast majority of people want their government to take stronger climate action. Journalism that connects those dots—accurately and fairly, and without pulling any punches—is a true public service.
ref 2 brennan Fossil Fuel Industry Donors See Major Returns in Trump’s Policies
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fossil fuel interests donated heavily to President Trump’s 2024 reelection bid. Months after his victory, oil and gas moguls have continued to pump money into his political coffers. Now, as promised by Trump during the campaign, his administration is embracing their policy agenda and governing in a way that is netting the industry billions.
Part of
Corruption in America**
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Trump asked oil and gas executives in 2024 to raise $1 billion for his campaign and told them he’d grant their policy wish list if he won. The investment, he said, would be a “deal” given the taxes and regulation they would avoid under his presidency. He also offered to help fast-track fossil fuel industry mergers and acquisitions if he won.
The industry responded by spending lavishly to elect Trump, giving at least $75 million to his campaign and affiliated PACs, thereby making them a top corporate backer of his reelection bid and a crucial source of funding.
Several oil tycoons gave millions on their own and hosted fundraisers with Trump and his associates. Some oil and gas executives who hadn’t given Trump money during previous cycles made major donations after attending fundraisers where he pledged to start acting on the industry’s policy priorities as soon as he retook the White House.
That’s just the spending we know about. The 2024 election saw record levels of “dark money” spending, where wealthy interests keep their role secret by funneling money through groups that do not disclose their donors. The fossil fuel industry has a history of deploying dark money tactics, and any such spending in 2024 would inherently be obscured.
Even after Trump’s victory in 2024, oil and gas interests have continued to pour money into his political operation. They gave $11.8 million to his inauguration fund, and even though Trump cannot run for a third term, his main super PAC has raked in millions more from the industry since he took office — including $25 million from oil producer Energy Transfer Partners and its CEO, Kelcy Warren.
As promised, Trump is rewarding the industry by adopting its policy agenda as his own. His signature legislative package — which one executive deemed “positive for us across all of our top priorities” — gives oil and gas firms $18 billion in tax incentives while rolling back incentives for clean energy alternatives. He’s placed fossil fuel allies in charge of the agencies that oversee the industry and fast-tracked drilling projects on public lands. In just his first 100 days back in office, Trump took at least 145 actions to undo environmental rules — more than he reversed during his entire first term as president. Before Trump even reentered the White House, the industry was reportedly pre-drafting executive orders for him to issue.
The profits are already rolling in for the industry. Take Warren and Energy Transfer Partners. Trump ended a Biden-era pause on liquefied natural gas exports and cleared the way for Energy Transfer Partners (which extracts liquefied natural gas) to extend a major project. Warren’s personal wealth grew nearly 10 percent after the administration greenlit the project as Energy Transfer Partners reported a boost in profits.
There’s also Occidental Petroleum, which donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, and whose CEO cohosted a major fundraiser for Trump in May 2024. Occidental is especially well positioned to see boosted profits from the sprawling array of favorable subsidies and tax incentives in his signature bill, passed into law this summer.
Now the Trump administration is taking its biggest swing yet for fossil fuel interests: repealing the “endangerment finding,” the federal government’s formal acknowledgement that global warming from greenhouse gases, produced by burning fossil fuels, endangers the public. The finding gives the government legal authority to set clean air rules, and it’s long been the subject of the fossil fuel lobby’s ire, surviving more than 100 challenges in court. Revoking the finding would erase scores of clean air rules that the industry opposes.
The fossil fuel industry is reaping major returns on its investment in the Trump administration. But what about the costs? Extreme weather events such as flooding, wildfires, and severe storms — which overwhelming scientific consensus has concluded are driven by global warming from fossil fuel usage — are becoming increasingly common, inflicting billions of dollars of damage on American communities and costing thousands of people their lives and livelihoods each year. Life-threatening summer heat affected more than 255 million Americans this year alone. It does not appear that these concerns are having any major impact on government policy, and instead, the administration fired hundreds of scientists tasked with tracking these issues.
Trump is far from the first president to use the office in ways that reward wealthy donors. Decades of harmful Supreme Court decisions, decaying anticorruption and campaign finance guardrails, and inadequate enforcement of existing rules around money in politics have enabled an unprecedented concentration of wealth and political power. So while Trump’s embrace of the fossil fuel industry’s agenda isn’t breaking entirely new ground, it offers yet another stark example of how wealthy interests are shaping policies that affect the lives of all Americans.
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**Extreme Drought Is Crashing Food Production Whether Russia Invades or Not**, byMark Hertzgaard. “In a world increasingly feeling the effects of climate change, the media must examine the role climate can play in igniting and inflaming conflicts. [On Feb. 11], as speculation that Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine mounted, ABC News reported that ‘the specter of a military confrontation’ was ‘pumping fresh life into the debate over whether president Joe Biden’s climate agenda is brushing up against difficult geopolitical realities.’ The story, which was produced by the network’s newly formed climate unit and ABC’s investigative team, was perhaps the first in the US media to examine the climate angle of the Ukraine conflict. It should not be the last. Even as newsrooms provide steady updates on the most immediate elements concerning Ukraine, from military maneuvers to diplomatic negotiations, they must help audiences understand the Ukraine conflict in its broader context.”
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/9/16/covering_climate_now_media_project
major new project from The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review hopes to improve global coverage of the climate crisis, with more than 250 media outlets around the world — including Democracy Now! — signing on to the effort to publish or broadcast stories on climate. Organizers say this is one of the most ambitious efforts ever to organize the world’s media around a single topic. The week of coverage, which leads up to next week’s U.N. Climate Action Summit, kicked off on Sunday. As part of the effort, CBS News released a new poll of over 2,000 U.S. residents that measured attitudes around climate change, which found that two-thirds of Americans believe climate change is either a crisis or a serious problem, and a majority want immediate action to address the Earth’s temperature rise. In San Francisco, we speak with Mark Hertsgaard, one of the co-founders of the project, called Covering Climate Now, and The Nation’s environment correspondent and investigative editor.
Transcript
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. Covering Climate Now. That’s the name of a new global initiative by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review to improve global coverage of the climate crisis. More than 250 media outlets around the world, including Democracy Now!, have signed on to the effort to focus on climate stories ahead of next week’s U.N. Climate Action Summit.
For years, the corporate media has been criticized for failing to connect the dots between climate change and extreme weather around the globe. A recent study by Public Citizen found the country’s leading print publications devoted 363 articles to Hurricane Dorian; only nine mentioned climate change. Another study, by Media Matters, in the first week after Dorian hit, from August 28th to September 5th, found, of the 216 segments aired on main television networks on Dorian, only one mentioned climate change.
We’re joined now by Mark Hertsgaard, one of the co-founders of Covering Climate Now. His new article, out today in The Nation, is headlined “A New Beginning for Climate Reporting.” He’s The Nation's environment correspondent, investigative editor. He's also author of seven books, including Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.
Mark Hertsgaard, welcome back to Democracy Now! Explain the scope of this project and what is coming out now around the world in the news media and how you put it together.
MARK HERTSGAARD: It’s great to be with you, Amy and everybody at Democracy Now! We’re so happy to have you as one of our partners in this project, Covering Climate Now, which has really taken off way beyond what we expected. As you mentioned, we have 250 news outlets from all around the world, across the U.S. and overseas, who have committed, in the following seven to eight days, to do serious climate coverage, leading up to the September 23rd United Nations Climate Action Summit there in New York at United Nations headquarters. And we calculated that if you put all these 250-plus news outlets together, our combined audience is over 1 billion people — with a B. And so, when we started this six months ago, we had no idea it would take off like this, but we’re very, very pleased that it has.
And I think it shows, actually, that — something that we suspected at the beginning of this, which is that we thought that a lot of our colleagues, including in the mainstream media, wanted to do more climate coverage, knew that this is the big story of our time, and just needed a little push, and that if there was a way for us to highlight this critical mass of journalists and news outlets that wanted to do more climate coverage, by highlighting that, we could grow that critical mass of coverage. And that’s exactly what’s happened. We thought that we’d have, you know, a couple dozen smaller outlets here in the U.S. joining us, and it’s just grown and grown and grown, as more and more journalists across the country and around the world have found out about this initiative. And now we’re up to 250 news outlets. And frankly, we’re hoping to make a little noise this week.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it’s very interesting when you look at these numbers on the coverage of Hurricane Dorian. You had massive, 24-hour-a-day, it almost seemed, certainly on the cable networks, coverage of the hurricane, as we should have seen it — you know, the slamming of the Bahamas and the devastation there — but almost no mention of climate crisis, of the climate change, of the —
MARK HERTSGAARD: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — intensity of these hurricanes, the frequency of these hurricanes, caused by human — well, behind it, it’s human actions, human activities, human-fueled climate change.
MARK HERTSGAARD: Sure. Yeah, the science on this is pretty clear. And unfortunately, the U.S. media, in particular, has a long ways to go in its climate coverage. You know, we are trying, first of all, to break the climate silence that you’re talking about here, Amy, that has been the main problem with media coverage of this issue going back for more than 20 years now. You know, I’ve been reporting on climate change since the 1990s, and I spent a lot of that decade traveling around the world. And it’s been clear ever since then that the U.S. media is about 10 years behind the media in Europe and Asia in reporting the climate crisis. First of all, we don’t mention it, as you just talked about. And when we do do the climate story, we often get it wrong.
For many years we had this false balance, where we felt that if we had on a real NASA scientist talking about climate science, that somehow, to be fair to the audience, we also had to have on somebody who said the climate science was bunk. And that person was usually just a paid propagandist for the fossil fuel industry. So, there is not a proud history here on the part of the media.
AMY GOODMAN: Be careful about mentioning that the world is round, Mark, because we’re going to have to bring on someone from the Flat Earth Society to counter what you say, just to give, you know, a fair and balanced approach to it.
MARK HERTSGAARD: Yeah, that has been just a disastrous point of view. And luckily, that is now fading, I think, this false balance. But still we have to break the silence. And I think this week is going to help do that.
We really — this consortium of Covering Climate Now is striking in many respects, in that we’ve got such a diversity. There’s very big outlets, like Bloomberg; like CBS News; like The Times of India, which alone has over 1 billion monthly unique visitors to its website; Asahi Shimbun, the biggest newspaper in Japan; La Repubblica, the biggest newspaper in Italy. And then, here in the U.S., we’ve got the San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, most of the major public radio stations in the country. So there’s a lot of participation, but also from some very small nonprofit outfits. I’m very proud to say that we’ve got participation from Togo, from Turkey, from Cambodia, from South Africa, from all over the world, from Portugal, Argentina, Chile. There are — many of our colleagues in the media know that the climate story is something that we have been, frankly, missing for too long. And we’re going to fix that.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark, one of the first big stories out this week, the CBS News poll, tell us what it found.
MARK HERTSGAARD: Sure. We worked closely with CBS on this. And they found that, essentially, most Americans understand that the climate crisis is serious, and they want action right now. And to me, the most interesting finding — well, there were two. One is that about 70%, 69%, of the American people expect that the next president takes serious climate action. There’s 56% of the public wants action right now, and another 13% want action in the next few years, meaning in the term of the incoming president. That is a very striking number that I think politicians in both parties need to be paying attention to.
But the second finding that is striking out of that CBS poll is that even though most Americans think climate crisis is serious and needs action, there is deep confusion about whether the scientists really believe this. Only about half of the country, 48%, understand the truth, which is that science is finished, is decided on this. Ninety-seven percent of the working climate scientists say that this is a serious problem, man-made, we have to do something about it. Forty-eight percent think that the scientists are not clear on this. That number, that 48 and 48%, the fact that people are confused about a basic fact about climate science, shows that we in the media have not been doing our job, and that for 20 years we have been taken in, really, by the propaganda of the fossil fuel industry, which has been saying, as you well know, Amy, and you’ve reported here on Democracy Now! numerous times — the fossil fuel industry has been saying for almost 30 years now, “Oh, the science isn’t clear.” They’ve been trying to muddy the waters with this false equivalence. And so, unfortunately, we’re still seeing the residue of that here in the public opinion. Now people can look out the window and see that climate science is real. Imagine, though, if we had had the proper coverage of climate science for these past 10, 20 years, what the poll data would be saying now and what the political candidates would be saying now, because there would be political awareness.
And that’s why we’re really doing this Covering Climate Now initiative, because, you know, last October, the IPCC scientists of the United Nations said we have 12 years in which to slash the emissions on this planet in half in order to basically retain a livable world. And they said — the scientists added that in order to do that, we need fundamental transformation in the economic sector, the energy sector, the transportation sector, construction, agriculture. But they left out one critical sector, which is the media sector. As you well know, Amy, the media is the key to political consciousness. And if you don’t have media coverage of the climate crisis, you will never have the public awareness and the public pressure that, frankly, is needed to get government and corporations to do what is required to face up to this climate crisis.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about the language that is used to describe the crisis. The Guardian recently wrote, “Instead of 'climate change' the preferred terms are 'climate emergency, crisis or breakdown' and 'global heating' is favoured over 'global warming', although the original terms are not banned.” But the significance of how this is described, Mark?
MARK HERTSGAARD: Sure. We’re very happy to have The Guardian as our lead media partner in Covering Climate Now. They’ve been with us from the beginning. And we chose them because they are the gold standard in climate coverage. If you are looking for good coverage, that’s the place to go. They have it on their front page every day. It’s solid reporting. It’s good analysis.
And, you know, they’ve been criticized at The Guardian, by some of our colleagues in the media, for using these terms, Amy, of “emergency” and “crisis,” as if this is somehow activist language. Follow the science. If you follow the science, those terms are not activism. If you think that having 12 years to turn around the entire world economy, to get it off of fossil fuels and to put it onto a climate-smart basis of solar, wind and efficiency, if that isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is. The scientists said in that report that the kinds of changes we need over the next 12 years are without precedent in human history, meaning we’ve never made this big of a change this fast. If that isn’t a crisis, if that isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is. That’s why the United Nations secretary-general, Mr. Guterres, has consistently said that we face a climate emergency. So, we feel, as journalists, our job is to be honest and straightforward about the facts. And the scientific facts here are very clear: This is a crisis situation.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about some of the leading stories that are coming out, the first exposés during this Covering Climate Now week, and why you feel — you just put out a piece today, “A New Beginning for Climate Reporting” — this U.N. summit, that’s taking place before Santiago, where Democracy Now! and hopefully all these news organizations will be, in Chile, in December — why this September 23rd Climate Action Summit at the U.N., you feel, is so important.
MARK HERTSGAARD: Sure. You know, Secretary-General Guterres called this summit precisely because governments around the world are not living up to the pledges that they made in Paris in December 2015, the very famous Paris Agreement, which is the high point of climate diplomacy. And we have an agreement among virtually every government on Earth that they would keep the temperature rise to, quote-unquote, “well below 2 degrees Celsius” and to try to get to 1.5 degrees. And that would require, as the scientists have said, dramatic shifts between now and 2030. And the secretary-general has called this summit next Monday, September 23, because the governments around the world are not living up to what they promised to do.
We are still on track to way over 2 degrees, probably somewhere between 3 and 5 degrees of temperature rise, which would be an absolute catastrophe. So, Secretary-General Guterres is summoning the world leaders to New York a day before the General Assembly meeting of the United Nations to say, “Look, you’ve got to increase your ambition. You’ve got to raise your game. We need to go faster and farther. The science is more serious than we thought.”
And I think, frankly, that he is trying to — the secretary-general is hoping that this summit, because of media coverage and because of pressure from the youth activists, will force governments to do a better job of living up to their pledges. And he’s famously told the heads of state, “Don’t bring a speech to the summit. Bring a plan.” In other words, no blah-blah-blah, that we usually have at U.N. meetings. Show us what you’re doing. Show us the concrete examples of cutting emissions that can be replicable around the world.
And that’s the good side of this, is that there are so many solutions out there now that make economic sense. California, where I’m talking to you from right now, fifth biggest economy in the world, California is on track to meet these targets. It can be done. But it’s going to take a push, and it really requires public pressure.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re speaking to us from San Francisco, Mark. As we wrap up, President Trump is expected to be out in California in these next days, doing his fundraisers, a proud climate change denier. Your message for him as he comes to San Francisco and Los Angeles?
MARK HERTSGAARD: I wish that President Trump would remember that I have a daughter, he has daughters. He has, presumably, grandchildren, as well, I think. And we owe it to them to do better than this. And I would just remind everyone that Donald Trump said that he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement. He has not. He cannot yet. That decision is for the next president. By the agreement itself, the U.S. cannot leave until one day after the 2020 presidential election. So, whoever Americans elect on November 3rd, 2020, that president will make the decision about whether the U.S. stays in the Paris Agreement or not.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Hertsgaard, I want to thank you for being with us and for this tremendous global effort to focus on the climate crisis. Mark is The Nation’s environment correspondent, investigative editor, author of seven books, including Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.
As we continue our climate coverage through the week, tomorrow we’ll spend the hour with Naomi Klein. It’s publication day for her. She has a new book out. It’s called On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we head north to Alaska, to President Trump’s efforts to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and what this means to the people and the environment of the area. Stay with us.
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There is a lot of evidence suggesting that we need to be a lot more careful about these cellphones. The World Health Organization has listed them as a possible carcinogen. And just last week, here in the United States, the National Institutes of Health had a major study, peer-reviewed, about cellphone radiation. And the peer-review scientists, who are independent of government, said that there was, quote, “clear evidence,” unquote, that cellphones can cause cancer.