Railroad Commission of Texas Commissioner Wayne Christian. Image: Official portrait.
For decades, unelected United Nations bureaucrats and Leftist allies have tried to force their anti-fossil fuel, pro-Net Zero, climate catastrophizing agenda on America and the rest of the world. Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump stood before the world and said bluntly what many of us have known for years: the UN’s climate crusade is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” Fig. 1.
Trump is on target about the scam. He didn’t mince words: “If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail,” said President Trump. He’s right. These so-called “solutions” aren’t about saving the planet—they’re a recipe for economic disaster, locking nations into unreliable energy and soaring costs. As the President reminded world leaders, America’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement wasn’t just symbolic—it was essential to protect our workers and families.
And the public agrees. According to a recent Associated Press-NORC poll, 72% of Americans say they haven’t personally benefited from the federal government’s climate initiatives. Worse yet, 60% of respondents believe the policies aren’t worth the cost. So, time to muster the troops and end the climate cartel’s assault on our American way of life, right?
You’d think. But you know who has remained silent on President Trump’s defense of fossil fuels—Major Oil companies. It should be common sense for an industry that has spent decades defending itself from radical environmental policies to welcome and rally to an ardent defender like Trump, but crickets…
Fig. 1. In his remarks to the United Nations on Sept. 23, U.S. President Donald Trump denounced the U.N.’s climate crusade. Image: White House photo.
Misplaced role of major oil companies. For about a decade now, major international oil and gas companies have gone from placating the radical environmental agenda to actively cowtailing it. Instead of fighting the PR battle in front of them, they have been too busy chasing taxpayer-subsidized carbon capture dollars and playing the carbon credits game with global environmentalists. Even though the Trump Administration is working on rolling back Obama’s carbon ruling, which designated CO2 as a pollutant and created the Net Zero movement. It’s shameful that oil and gas companies are trying to hide what they do—which is producing reliable energy for Americans—as a PR stunt to mitigate the woke mob.
They should support President Trump’s criticism of the UN climate change agenda, because it directly challenges the unrealistic and damaging policies that threaten the industry’s ability to provide affordable and reliable energy to the world. They’d rather rub elbows with Leftists, who want to end their industry, than stand with Republicans, who fight for them. Clearly, they learned nothing from the last four years during the Biden Administration’s war on fossil fuels.
Keeping a check on the Chinese. President Trump rightly calls the UN’s global climate efforts a “green scam” that could lead to economic failure for countries that embrace it, especially when such policies disproportionately burden fossil fuel producers and the workers they employ. His focus on promoting American oil and gas not only defends jobs and energy independence, but also pushes back against international mandates that unfairly restrict fossil fuel development while allowing global competitors, like China and Russia, to continue with unchecked emissions.
Fig. 2. Chinese Premeir Li Qiang worked to refute President Trump’s remarks during his appearance at the U.N. podium. Image: United Nations.
President Trump’s clearly doing something right, because he touched a nerve with the Chinese, who were unusually vocal on the global stage about the president’s take on climate change, Fig. 2. China’s criticism is the height of hypocrisy. The same government that lectures us is burning more coal than anyone on Earth while churning out wind turbines and solar panels in plants powered by fossil fuels—to sell to the rest of the world (including Texas)! It’s laughable—China wants to get rich off the green agenda while refusing to play by the same rules, all while keeping their own economy running on fossil fuels.
Protecting assets in Texas and other states. As a Texas Railroad Commissioner, I’ve seen first-hand how these global mandates threaten our oil fields, refineries, and manufacturing plants. Meanwhile, the “experts” keep moving the goal posts—calling it global warming when it’s hot, climate change when it’s cold—because the science never quite aligns with their predictions. In fact, the science of climate change is far from settled. The UN climate models are constantly being “updated” or modified, and wildly irresponsible climate predictions—like the starvation of 4 billion people during the 1980s—have not happened. That doesn’t sound like settled science to me.
Texans and other energy states know the truth: top-down green mandates don’t help families—they hurt them. They spike utility bills, strain fragile grids, and hand America’s energy security over to hostile powers, like China and Saudi Arabia. By trusting American ingenuity, instead of UN mandates, we’ve produced more energy, lowered emissions, and kept energy affordable for working families.
Trump is leading the fight. President Trump’s message is unambiguous: America will not bow to global bureaucrats, who want to kill our cows, ban our trucks, and destroy our way of life. We will not sacrifice our jobs, freedom, or economic strength for failed globalist schemes.
He is fighting for the common man—and it’s past time that the rest of the world listened.
Nevertheless, the war isn’t over, the battle is just beginning, and President Trump’s UN remarks are like a general’s speech before the charge. So long as the Net Zero agenda remains a misleading movement and major oil and gas companies enable it, there’s a fight to be had.
Top image: Copyright 2024, Railroad Commission of Texas, image by Katie Wilson.
