That’s the central thrust of a couple of news writers in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal. Their lede:
Big Oil has a tough balancing act: help further President Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda and stick to its climate goals at the same time.
And
The escalating assault on climate initiatives puts large drillers such as Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and Occidental Petroleum in an awkward posture. They have pledged to curb their emissions—and unveiled plans to spend billions of dollars on low-carbon technologies such as carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and biofuels.
This whole idea of a “tough balancing act” is utter nonsense. The Trump administration simply is moving to take the shackles off American energy production.
Nor is there anything at all in the Trump administration’s assault rolling back of climate initiatives that make no economic or climate sense that prevents those and other businesses from continuing those pledges. On the contrary, in the present and improving environment, “Big Oil,” natural gas producers, coal miners, wind and solar energy producers—all of them—are better able to make their production decisions, including those concerning their emissions, based on sound business decision-making and not in response to government pressures to produce only certain types of energy.