Trump Is Freeing Up Public Lands for Big Oil. It Doesn’t Want Them.
Earlier this week, the Department of Justice issued a legal opinion stating that Donald Trump can abolish two national monuments in California established by the Biden administration. In theory, doing so would allow those areas—the windswept Chuckwalla National Monument in Southern California, and the verdant Sáttítla Highlands National Monument, near Oregon—to be opened up for oil and gas drilling. The Department of Interior has been eager to remove protections for these and other national monuments in the name of boosting fossil fuel extraction, as part of Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda. Environmentalists and Indigenous nations have fiercely criticized the administration’s attacks on public lands, and have fought to protect the areas, which house rare species and encompass the ancestral homelands of the Pit River Tribe and the Modoc Peoples, from development. Curiously, what primarily stands to prevent drilling there now is the drillers themselves, who have soured on a president who doesn’t understand the first thing about their business.
There may be no metric Donald Trump is more obsessed with, and understands less about, than the price of oil. For its part, the oil industry has been unimpressed by the White House’s dramatic regulatory rollbacks and gifts of federal land, which haven’t managed to outweigh their hatred of Trump’s tariffs or his ironclad commitment to lower gas prices. (The general chaos emanating from Washington hasn’t helped win industry support, either.) The majority of U.S. oil is produced using costly extraction methods such as fracking, and drillers need relatively high oil prices to break even. This is a toxic combination: As oil has been getting cheaper, costs for essential inputs like steel have gone up. Broader uncertainty about the direction of the economy, partly fueled by tariffs, has made it difficult for companies to make longer-term planning decisions and court investors. Trump’s performative abolishment of protections for national monuments won’t fix any of these problems.
The truth is that what the oil industry needs right now isn’t more land. It’s “prices high enough to make … drilling possible,” Rory Johnston, an oil market researcher, told me. “It wouldn’t matter if you doubled the availability of acres. If the prices aren’t there, they aren’t going to drill.”
Even in more optimistic times, drilling on former monument sites was a tough sell. In 2017, Trump dismantled two national monuments in Utah: Grand Staircase–Escalante and Bears Ears. Oil and gas companies didn’t bite, and Biden restored the monuments’s status after taking office. That pitch hasn’t gotten any stronger under Trump 2.0. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’s most recent quarterly energy survey, released in March, featured industry executives tearing into the administration they helped elect. “The rhetoric from the current administration is not helpful,” said one respondent. “If the oil price continues to drop, we will shut in production.”