Michael Lind
Has Donald Trump been reading Don Quixote? Last week, the incoming President warned the UK that it was making “a very big mistake” by raising tax on North Sea oil. His solution? “Get rid of windmills.”
It was classic Trump, the Presidential candidate who fashioned himself as a friend of Big Oil, promising to free up the nation’s stores of liquid gold and secure America’s “energy dominance”. Thanks to Biden’s pause, which yesterday crescendoed into a ban, on new oil and gas leases, along with his restrictive environmentalist agenda, America’s stocks have been kept in reserve. And Trump wants to exploit them.
But does this mean the US can expect another oil boom? Not so fast.
In America, the oil business is identified in the public mind with individual Texas oil men and their families. Think Hollywood movies like Giant (1956), starring Rock Hudson and James Dean, and the Eighties TV soap opera Dallas, whose Machiavellian antihero, J.R. Ewing, was portrayed by the late Larry Hagman (who happens to be my cousin twice removed). Today, the hybridisation of pop culture and petroculture continues with Landman, starring Billy Bob Thornton as a jack-of-all-trades working for an oil company.
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