By Richard Cowan and Timothy Gardner
WASHINGTON, Sept 24 (Reuters) – Two top Democrats in the US Senate launched a report on Thursday saying that oil and gas companies were rewarded with tax breaks, subsidies and rollbacks of environmental regulation after then-candidate Donald Trump asked them for $1 billion in donations during the 2024 campaign.
The report by Senators Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, and Sheldon Whitehouse, the top Democrat on the environment committee, was based on 19 investigations of regulatory rollbacks by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 13 investigations into nine other agencies and 13 probes into what they called 88 polluters.
The report says that hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign spending that it tracked after Trump’s ask of the energy companies resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks and revenues as the policies pushed consumers to purchase more fossil fuels.
“Working families foot the bill, through higher energy prices, weakened public services, and the long-term costs of climate and health damage, while Big Oil executives and shareholders reap the rewards,” the report said. “This is, at its core, a massive transfer of wealth.”
The report could be a window into what issues Democratic lawmakers will hold hearings on should they take control of the Senate in November’s midterm elections. The senators will hold a press conference on the report at 9:45 a.m. ET.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rodgers refuted the report.
“These Democrat Senators should do some self-reflection on their ties to the so-called ‘green’ energy industry. They wasted billions of American taxpayer dollars in the name of the Green New Scam,” Rodgers said.
In the administration’s latest move to dismantle environmental regulations, the EPA this month announced rules to repeal former President Joe Biden’s limits on carbon emissions from coal and gas-fired power plants and to prevent future climate-focused regulations on them. The moves are part of Trump’s efforts to unwind US climate policy that his administration says has hindered energy production.
The EPA said the move would save the industry hundreds of millions in compliance costs, while the Biden administration said its rule would result in hundreds of billion in benefits, including reduced medical bills for health problems caused by smog and other emissions.
(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Additional reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Kevin Buckland and Nick Zieminski)
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