Contact: Seth Nelson
In response to the news that the White House is convening a call with the CEOs of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, and other major oil companies to ask them to drill more amid rising gas prices that have surged nearly a dollar a gallon on average since the start of Trump’s illegal war with Iran, Evergreen Action Executive Director Lena Moffitt released the following statement:
“Trump chose his Big Oil donors over affordable energy, started an illegal war that’s making them rich, and is now giving them license to take advantage of this crisis to boost their profits even more. That logic makes zero sense. It’s like the arsonist trying to put out the fire by lighting another one. These companies aren’t riding to the rescue, and more domestic drilling will only help corporate executives rake in more cash while global energy prices are sky high. They’re choosing to pocket every dollar of these war-driven profits—more than $30 million every single hour in just the first month of this war. Chevron’s CEO alone raked in $104 million while the U.S. was bombing Iran. Meanwhile, American households have already shelled out an average of $129 more due to higher gas prices.
“Every time there’s a war, fossil fuel prices spike. That’s what it means to be shackled to a volatile global commodity. And Trump built his entire energy agenda around deepening that dependency: handing Big Oil billions in new tax breaks, attacking their clean energy competitors at every turn, and torching the investments that were rapidly adding cheap, new clean power to the grid. The one path to energy prices that don’t skyrocket every time there’s a war is homegrown clean energy that no foreign conflict and no oil executive can hold over American families, which Trump has spent his entire presidency actively destroying. The White House’s grand plan is to drill down on the strategy that got us here, and American families are the ones paying the price.
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