Trump got the Big Oil cash he wanted — so now he’s killing the planet
Even top climate experts are shocked at the speed with which Trump is undoing their work, after $450M in Big Oil donations.

Not unlike 1967, June 2025 is bringing us purple haze — not the Jimi Hendrix version, but the smoke from Canadian wildfires — and the promise of another “long hot summer.” I don’t necessarily mean the kind that caused Detroit, Newark, and other U.S. cities to erupt in riots 58 years ago, although ICE raids from San Diego to Minneapolis are spiking the thermostat of potential unrest. Nor am I talking about the long lines to get into national parks after Elon Musk chainsawed the federal workers who run them.
No, I’m talking about an actually hot and actually long summer triggered by human-made climate change — a smoke-infused taste of which much of America is already getting this week as more than 200 wildfires, many uncontrollable, burn across remote areas of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Scientists say the unusually early massive blazes have been triggered by drought and unusually high temperatures, including a May high of 91 degrees Fahrenheit in Saskatchewan that is shocking for the Great White North.
Experts using a formula called the Climate Shift Index (CSI) — a kind of science that hasn’t been banned or defunded by the Trump regime ... not yet, anyway — say the spring heat wave over western Canada is an event that was five times more likely because of the carbon that humans blast into earth’s atmosphere from our cars and power plants running on fossil fuels.
The Canadian wildfires and the poor air quality over the central and eastern U.S. are certainly not an isolated incident. Europe recently experienced its hottest March ever, by a lot; the government scientists who haven’t been laid off are predicting a more active hurricane season than usual (even as the new MAGA head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency admits he didn’t know there is a hurricane season); and hot ocean temperatures are even shrinking clown fish, making finding Nemo harder than ever.
It’s a situation that screams out for a government as good as its people to spring into action, especially when it comes to weaning an oil-addicted U.S. society off fossil fuels and helping to speed the transition to electric vehicles or clean energy that won’t spew more carbon into our smoky skies. Unless your government has Donald Trump at the helm.
It was no secret while the 45th president was running last year to become the 47th, that Trump brings the baggage of a lifetime of oil-and-gas boosterism and hostility to the science surrounding climate change. But experts and activists say they’ve been shocked during the regime’s first four-and-a-half months by the extent to which Trump has pushed back against any and all evidence that a warming planet poses a danger to humankind.
That was driven home in April when the Trump regime dismissed hundreds of scientists who’d been working on the National Climate Assessment, which since 2000 has been the government’s main report about potential threats from global warming. In Trump world, it’s not that climate change gets too much attention, but that it doesn’t even exist as a problem.
No one was surprised when Trump withdrew the United States from the global Paris climate accords, since he’d done the same thing in his first term. But few expected him to issue an executive order directing his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to take legal action if necessary to block states from enacting their own measures to mitigate climate change. Every sop to Big Fossil Fuels — such as an executive order meant to revive the coal industry, or a push to export U.S. fracked gas overseas — has been accompanied with sometimes inexplicable cuts to green energy programs, including grants that would bring jobs and millions of dollars to Trump-voting red states.
“Trump’s climate actions have absolutely been worse than expected,” Michael E. Mann, director of Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, told me this week. A recent Guardian op-ed that Mann coauthored with other leading scientists argued that Trump orders, like a recent demand for “gold-standard science,” was really intended for the government to impede needed research. “It’s not just an assault on climate action or even climate science, but science itself,” he told me.
» READ MORE: Trump would sell your grandkid’s future for $1B | Will Bunch Newsletter
Some of Trump’s more extreme moves — especially in trying to undo climate actions taken by his nemesis Joe Biden — feel more motivated by spite than by common sense. But the most likely explanation for the evil banality of a would-be king’s climate madness is a tale as old as time: political corruption.
In April 2024, according to a scoop by the Washington Post, Trump hosted a fundraising dinner at Mar-a-Lago for Big Oil CEOs set up by Harold Hamm, a Texas drilling billionaire. There’s no tape of the closed-door gathering, but sources told the Post that the then-candidate proposed “a deal”: If the fossil fuel executives would give a whopping $1 billion to his campaign, he would roll back Biden’s climate policies with lightning speed.
It was an outlandish proposal that, practically, was never going to meet Trump’s great expectations. But while you can’t always get what you want, you can get what you need. In the last election cycle, Big Oil and Gas spent some $445 million on campaign contributions and lobbying Congress, and probably considerably more if dark money had been included.
Trump got a big chunk of this — at least $96 million, but probably more — that went to his campaign from the likes of Hamm, who leads the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, and pipeline CEO Kelcy Warren, whose Energy Partners LP will profit from efforts to export America’s natural gas.
Trump’s political support from Big Oil isn’t as new or sexy as his family’s audacious embrace of the cryptocurrency boom, which has helped to increase the president’s net worth by an estimated $2.9 billion. And while Trump’s Cryptogate will mean less regulation of a fraud-laden industry, and surely some little-guy investors losing their life’s savings, it can’t compare to the wildfires, killer floods, and eventual mass migration and other upheavals of climate change.
It’s not only that Trump got a much needed infusion of campaign cash from Big Oil. But those billionaires who paid homage to the future president at Mar-a-Lago ... those were his people. The Black and brown folks who live in pollution-ravaged communities like Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” or in low-lying neighborhoods most prone to flooding? Not so much.
It’s depressing the extent to which America has normalized climate denial. You hear so much about Trump’s worst cabinet picks like overwhelmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and performatively fascist Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, but rarely about the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, who sees the mission of EPA not as fighting pollution but to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.”
Yet I suspect that when the handful of surviving historians emerge from rubble-strewn caves many decades from now — probably in a rowboat — they won’t be asking why Trump reposted about Biden being a robotic clone, but rather why the government of Earth’s richest nation chose to pretend that the thermometer wasn’t flashing red for danger.
By rejecting democracy, Trump also rejects the empathy and fealty to the truth that’s needed to keep the U.S. people and the next generations safe. With a big chuck of Canada on fire, it’s time for Americans to see through his toxic, billionaire-funded smoke screen.
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