A couple of weeks ago when President Donald Trump was rumored to be on the fence about whether to abandon the Paris climate agreement, 22 Republican Senators sent him a letter urging him to back out of the deal.
The letter’s signatories included Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, and both Senators from Texas, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.
Certain sectors of the oil and gas industry have supported leaving the Paris accords, assuming deregulation will drive oil profits.
Now The Guardian has discoveredthat the 22 Senators who signed onto the letter have received over $10 million dollars in oil, gas and coal money over the past five years.
Kansas’s Pat Roberts received $418,000 from oil and gas companies; Oklahoma’s James Inhofe, the most vocal skeptic of climate change in the senate, pocketed over half a million dollars in fossil-fuel profits; and John Cornyn and Ted Cruz of Texas received almost $5 million dollars between them.