Who is running our country’s environmental and climate change? The new robber barons of course!
The executives dining at the White House to celebrate President Trump’s $300 million ballroom — and their role in financing it — were a who’s who of American industry. Many hailed from companies that are household names, like Microsoft, OpenAI and Comcast.
Seated among them was Harold G. Hamm, the 13th child of Oklahoma sharecroppers and founder of an oil company, Continental Resources, that is little known outside of energy circles.
Mr. Hamm is a wildcatter, an oil prospector who drills wells in unproven areas, taking big bets that can turn into black gold or financial ruin.
Not long ago, it seemed as if Mr. Hamm and his allies in the oil industry were losing. They were deeply out of favor in Washington — and on Wall Street — shunned for contributing to climate change and failing to deliver the returns investors wanted.
Mr. Hamm was among Mr. Trump’s earliest oil industry backers, and that loyalty — paired with more than $2 million in campaign contributions — has earned him outsize influence.
Mr. Hamm, who turned 80 this month and recently adopted the title of chairman emeritus as he stepped back at Continental, has used that influence to position loyalists for top administration jobs.
They include Chris Wright, a longtime fossil fuel executive and a former director of an oil-industry lobbying group that Mr. Hamm co-founded. Mr. Wright is now Mr. Trump’s energy secretary. The Interior secretary job went to Doug Burgum, a former North Dakota governor and close ally of Mr. Hamm’s whose family has leased land to Continental for drilling.