It turns out slogans don’t count quite as much as global pricing mechanisms. No matter how much Donald Trump promises to open up more oil and gas drilling opportunities for his pals in the industry, if the price per barrel stays relatively low those companies will act accordingly. This week, the US’s second-largest oil company Chevron made that clear, saying it will lay off around 9,000 people over the next two years in a cost-cutting measure; that’s 20 percent of its entire workforce.
The announcement comes only a couple of weeks after the company’s fourth quarter report showed 2024 earnings of $17.7 billion. Chevron increased its oil and gas production worldwide by seven percent last year, and by 19 percent in the US. Those earnings were down, though, compared to 2023, thanks to oil prices dropping over the course of the year toward around $70 per barrel.
Of course, Trump’s promise to unleash the oil companies wasn’t made for their employees; the executives are still doing fine as the layoffs begin. In fact, much of this move, as well as others like BP’s recent announcement to lay off five percent of its workforce have a lot more to do with companies getting better at pulling oil and gas out of the ground with fewer people. Chevron’s output is expected to increase again this year, by around six percent, even as it starts shedding employees.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s efforts to reward those executives continues. On Wednesday he nominated Kathleen Sgamma to run the Bureau of Land Management, the part of the Interior Department that oversees vast amounts of oil and gas exploration on public land, among other things. Sgamma, the president of an oil industry trade group called the Western Energy Alliance, would be an “unmitigated disaster,” according to Taylor McKinnon, of the non-profit Center for Biological Diversity. “She’s a fossil fuel industry hack with breathtaking disdain for environmental laws, endangered species, recreation or anything other than industry profits. It’s hard to imagine how Trump could give a bigger middle finger to America’s public lands.”
Adds Drew Caputo of Earthjustice: “Sgamma’s nomination sends a clear message that our public lands are up for sale to the highest bidder.”
Minus 9,000 of its employees, Chevron will have a bit more money to join that bidding, of course. The industry writ-large continues to thrive, and it will certainly enjoy a degree of planet-destroying impunity under Trump that it at least nominally lacked before; but the administration goals to “unleash” more oil and gas and create jobs and economic prosperity in the process are already looking like the nonsense they are.
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