The Oil Oligarch Shaping Trump’s Energy Strategy

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.