Republicans are comparing fossil fuel companies to oppressed minorities

It takes gall to compare banks’ flagging enthusiasm for the oil industry to racism. But no one ever accused the Trump administration of insufficient gall.
Five American banks have said they won’t finance Arctic oil and gas drilling. In remarks published Monday in Axios, Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette compared this to redlining—the systematic (and illegal) denial of services, including loans and insurance, to communities of color, which perpetuated segregation and inequality. “For years and years and years, banks would not lend money, insurance companies would not write policies in minority areas of the country,” Brouillette told Axios’s Amy Harder. “Redlining is the term used all throughout those debates. We didn’t want banks redlining certain parts of the country. We don’t want that here. I do not think banks should be redlining our oil and gas investment across the country.”
This absurdity is the culmination of weeks of rhetoric by Republican lawmakers that any stimulus failing to buoy the struggling oil and gas industry is “discriminating” against fossil fuels. In an April 24 letter to the Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Senator Ted Cruz wrote, “The Administration should not be picking winners and losers among different energy sources, but President Trump has rightly committed not to allow financial institutions to discriminate against the oil and gas industry and use this crisis to make politically-driven equity calls that force the bankruptcy of American producers.” Thirty-six Republicans on Capitol Hill, including Cruz, echoed this language—“discriminate,” “discriminatory,” “discriminating”—four times in a May 7 open letter to the president.

To state the obvious, declining to finance climate destruction is not remotely analogous to denying mortgages to people of color. Decarbonization is a commonsense goal for reducing human suffering, and, as TNR’s Kate Aronoff has repeatedly pointed out, there are a number of entirely apolitical reasons for banks to be wary of fossil fuels. They’re not a very good investment. The sector is heavily indebted, plagued by oversupply, and speckled with shale companies that “have never turned a profit and looked bound for bankruptcy even before the coronavirus reached U.S. shores.” The fossil fuel industry has always relied on favorable terms from the government.
Amid the current economic crisis, the administration has slapped the renewable power industry—which is also struggling in this moment—with huge retroactive rent bills for operating on federal lands. “The Interior Department had stopped charging the rents at the end of 2018,” Reuters reported Monday, “to review company complaints that former President Barack Obama’s administration had increased them too much, making them uncompetitive with rents on private property.” That review appears to have disappeared into the rapidly carbonizing ether. “The Interior Department declined repeated requests to comment on the outcome of that review, or the issuance of the retroactive rent bills.”
Contrary to what Ted Cruz and other Republicans would have you believe about America’s “free market,” the government has long been in the business of “picking winners and losers among different energy sources.” The task ahead for the government—as even the Financial Times, hardly a hotbed of revolutionary activity, argued last week—is to start choosing more sustainable winners.
—Heather Souvaine Horn, Deputy Editor