Are Regulations Bad For Business? Oil Execs Say Trump’s Policies Won’t Lead To Much Change

For all their efforts to fight government regulation often intended to stymie pollution and climate change, oil and gas firms likely wouldn’t see a burst in productivity or profits under the deregulatory agenda of President Donald Trump.

That was according to a Reuters analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission reports, in which 13 of the 15 largest oil companies reported to shareholders that compliance with current rules, many leftover from the administration of former President Barack Obama, wasn’t hurting them financially. The remaining two chose not to comment, although, Reuters found, complying with federal rules cost them less than 3 percent of their revenues.

Read: Exxon Mobil To Benefit From Elimination Of Environmental And Financial Regulations By Congress

For ExxonMobil Corp., the former and only employer of Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, following the rules translated to a 2.24 revenue loss. For Chevron, the cost was only 1.91 percent, and for ConocoPhillips, 2.57 percent.

Trump campaigned on promises to keep government regulations in check, and has labeled climate change a hoax invented by China.

Already, the president has appointed former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt—whose office in the state quietly aided deregulatory efforts by oil and gas industry executives, recently released emails revealed—to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

When Trump unveiled his “America First” budget blueprint in mid-March, the EPA lost the largest percentage of funding of all the agencies hit with spending cuts, with 31 percent of its budget scrapped.

Read: Trump And The Environment: New EPA Reform Would Gut Obama Rule Protecting Water Quality

On Feb. 28, he signed an executive order initiating a review of an EPA rule defining the water bodies that fall under federal government protection from environmentally-risky activities. They included hydraulic fracturing, in which water, chemicals and sand are pumped into the ground to release natural gas.

Less than a week later, at the urging of 11 Republican leaders in mostly southern states, Pruitt rolled back an EPA request for data on oil and gas companies’ methane emissions on March 3. The basis was that the surveys represented “onerous requirements” for the industry, according to a letter signed by the GOP politicians.