In 2015, the Oklahoma oil magnate Harold Hamm got a glimpse of the future and didn’t like what he saw. Renewable energy, he realized, was a threat to the long-term dominance of oil and natural gas.
At the time, Oklahoma was facing a budget crisis and lawmakers wanted to increase taxes on oil and gas. To protect a lucrative tax break for his company, Continental Resources, Mr. Hamm waged a brutal campaign against the wind industry to convince lawmakers and the public that the tax breaks it received were the real problem.
In a 2016 commentary, he called the wind industry “parasitic” and a “drain on state coffers.” A coalition he helped create ran an ad campaign in which the former University of Oklahoma football coach Barry Switzer accused wind turbines of “blowing a hole in our state’s budget.” Nevermind that Oklahoma spent roughly four times as much on tax breaks for the state’s oil-and-gas industry. In the end, Mr. Hamm prevailed, and lawmakers kept the oil tax at a low 2 percent for the first couple of years of new production, while eliminating two tax breaks for wind-energy developers.
In the years since, the United States has experienced an energy renaissance. Oil production is way up, and so is the production of natural gas, which we now export around the world. At the same time, the country has built a substantial wind industry and is in the early years of a remarkable solar power boom. A new nuclear power plant powered on in 2023, something that hadn’t happened in the United States since the 1980s.
This diversification has been great for the country: America’s power plants emit a lot less carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide for every megawatt generated than before, and we’ve reduced our dependence on foreign energy supplies. And it’s been accomplished without pushing up energy costs.
Yet for the 79-year-old Mr. Hamm, whose privately held company is the 13th-largest oil producer in the United States, according to the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, with $2 billion in profits last year, a more competitive marketplace is threatening and ideologically abhorrent. He has taken his fight against renewables national — and made a project out of influencing President Trump.
Mr. Hamm’s allies now hold key posts in the administration; among them is Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who delivered an uncompromising defense of fossil fuels in a recent speech in Houston. Together, they are shaping a policy of fossil fuels above all else that would benefit Mr. Hamm and other domestic oil producers. It would also steer the nation away from the path that has made the United States more energy secure without driving up costs.
Mr. Hamm, who didn’t respond to requests for an interview, has seen his relationship with the new president grow cozier over the years. At their first business meeting in Trump Tower in 2012, Mr. Hamm told Mr. Trump about how new drilling techniques would increase U.S. oil production. Mr. Trump noted that the oilman was without a tie, so he took him to the gift shop in the lobby and offered him some with the Trump brand.
A couple of years later, when Mr. Hamm was photographed for a magazine cover, he wore a royal blue Trump tie. If the choice of neckwear was intended as a code, the message was received. Mr. Trump sent Mr. Hamm a letter complimenting him on his sartorial choice. He enclosed more ties.
In those days, Mr. Trump was relatively unschooled on energy matters, and Mr. Hamm may have begun passing along his belief that nationalism and petroleum go hand in hand. In a 2022 interview, he described himself as “an oilocrat, and also I’m a patriot.”
In 2016, Mr. Hamm was one of the first chief executives to endorse Mr. Trump’s presidential candidacy, though he said he turned down an offer to become energy secretary. When Mr. Trump’s campaign to return to office was underway in 2023, Mr. Hamm’s support wavered, and he backed Ron DeSantis and then Nikki Haley during the primary race. But after they dropped out, the energy executive returned to Mr. Trump’s team with renewed conviction.
Mr. Hamm organized an “energy round table” for Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago last April with about 20 energy chief executives. At that meeting, Mr. Trump bluntly asked for $1 billion in donations from the oil industry and promised to roll back regulations. The industry didn’t meet that lofty goal, but it was a major financial backer of Mr. Trump’s campaign. Mr. Hamm did his share, giving more than $4 million to political action committees supporting Mr. Trump.
At the same Mar-a-Lago meeting, Mr. Hamm introduced Mr. Trump to his friend Mr. Wright, the chief executive of an oil-and-gas fracking firm, Liberty Energy. The new head of the Interior Department is the former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, whom Mr. Hamm has also known for years through Continental’s oil operations in the state.
Mr. Hamm recently described the two cabinet secretaries as a “dream team of unimaginable proportions.” He hosted a lavish inauguration party at which oil-and-gas industry companies and lobbying groups celebrated their close ties to the new administration.
Speaking at a major oil industry conference in Houston, Mr. Wright echoed ideas from Mr. Hamm’s 2023 book, “Game Changer.” Mr. Hamm wrote that fossil fuels “are the reason we have a modern world, lifting billions out of poverty.”
In his own rousing defense of fossil fuels, Mr. Wright called climate change a mere “side effect” of building a modern world with longer life expectancy and “lifting almost all of the world’s citizens out of grinding poverty.” He also attacked renewables. “Everywhere wind and solar penetration have increased significantly, prices on the grid went up and stability of the grid went down,” he said.
While it’s true that some states’ grids have struggled, Texas’ largely has not. Renewable penetration there has grown steadily, topping 30 percent throughout 2024. Prices have been flat recently and fell in 2024 as more solar power and batteries helped reduce summertime price spikes. The day of Mr. Wright’s speech in Houston, as much as 67 percent of the electricity keeping the lights on in Texas came from solar and wind farms.
For Mr. Hamm, energy poverty is personal. He was the youngest of 13 children born to sharecroppers in central Oklahoma who relied on kerosene lamps for light and blocks of ice for refrigeration until an electric line was strung to his family’s house. He started his career as an oil field truck driver, cleaning the sludge out of tanks before going on to build a multibillion-dollar petroleum empire.
He’s right that fossil fuels have given us air-conditioning, plastics and airplanes, but they are also responsible for fueling stronger heat waves and deadlier fires . The vexing question is how to balance responding to climate change with powering the economy in the coming years. Mr. Hamm’s answer seems to be a return to the energy system we had 20 years ago, in which wind and solar energy were insignificant, and natural gas was becoming dominant, alongside nuclear.
Pursuing the old ways would not only accelerate global warming but also undermine the energy boom unleashed by renewable energy and modern fracking techniques. And for what? We’re not in an energy crisis.
The share of American household budgets used to pay for electricity, heating and gasoline is at one of the lowest points in a generation. We’re breaking energy production records with every passing month. And our greenhouse gas emissions are down about 18 percent since 2005, though this trend could reverse if new Trump administration policies slow or stop development of wind and solar farms. Mr. Hamm’s hard-line, pro-fossil-fuel position would reverse these changes and raise prices.
Energy is simply too important to upset the apple cart. Every business and every household depends on it. So does our national security, and our competitiveness. Shutting down solar and batteries, the fastest-growing parts of our power grids, only risks the future.
Russell Gold is a distinguished writer at Texas Monthly and the author of “Superpower: One Man’s Quest to Transform American Energy.”
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