It’s not meant to benefit consumers, it’s meant to enrich fossil-fuel companies even more.

Especially when you consider they are forcing through a huge expansion of exports which will unequivocally make domestic prices higher.

Guess what: they never gave a single shit about prices.

This is a false premise. Actual expansion of oil and gas production does lower those commodity prices, but policies/events so far raise them.

• Maximizing strategic oil reserve holdings
• LNG export infrastructure, especially if he can extort international customers to buy/divert from US consumption.
• KSA vowing to invest $600B in US is a bribe to keep oil prices high. That enables funding their investment. KSA investments in past have been in non-oil industries.
• Banning wind and EV adoption means more FF use/demand.
• AI datacenters in US only, or massive funding for US ones, is more FF use.
• unlikely but forced extra sanctions on Russian energy
• possible regulation removal on capturing or even flaring NG from oil deposits would be aweful.

The false premise is that letting O&G pollute everything, doesn’t make it “smart” for them to overproduce, and if they do drill more, than KSA/opec can ramp up production to take more share before they come online. Producing just enough extra to keep up with demand and $70+/barrel pricing is likely.

EVs globally are eating into oil demand. China has also converted many trucks/heavy vehicles to LNG. NG and coal demand in Europe down over 10% in 2024. Peace in Ukraine would be the most significant drop in oil/diesel use foreseeable.