Lone Star

Monday 4 May 2026

Gulf station, Waco, Texas

Senate candidate James Talarico of Texas has voiced full support for the oil and gas industry, in a reminder that Democrats will have to broaden the tent if they want to expand their numbers in the Senate and the House. Talarico can be thought of as a kind of experiment: After numerous near misses, what combination of positions would actually give a Democratic candidate a chance to win a Senate seat in Texas? So far, Talarico seems to have hit upon the optimal mix. His background is rooted in a distinctly more progressive version of Christianity, and this particular signal—a friendly embrace of the oil and gas industry—is clearly designed to loosen calcified distinctions in the Lone Star State. The strategy appears to be working. Recent polling and prediction markets show that regardless of whether Cornyn or Paxton is the nominee on the Republican side, Talarico has converted the race into a tossup.

Talarico made his comments on the Ranch Hall podcast earlier this year, declaring that the oil and gas industry is critical to the Texas economy and to working families. He also embraced the growth of wind and solar power and correctly pointed out that Texas was a 20th-century giant in energy, and that renewables point to the state’s continued dominance in the 21st. What’s intriguing to ponder here is that Talarico will surely be criticized within the Democratic party for making such accommodating remarks, but the irony is that voicing support for the existing oil and gas industry is almost entirely without any ramification, and in the end is mostly costless. As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama took the exact same position. Talarico repeated Obama’s phrase too, an embrace of an “all of the above strategy.” And what did Obama do, practically, while in office? Instead of either promoting or interfering with the U.S. oil and gas industry, his administration got busy, creating the conditions to help wind and solar reach a takeoff point. What’s not to like?

Cold Eye Earth has laid out previously the observation that the “words” uttered by politicians, more often than not, have little to no bearing on the fortunes of the U.S. oil and gas industry. The March 6, 2023, issue, Energy and the Presidents, showed that oil production declined quite seriously under the presidency of Bush (an oilman from Texas); soared under Obama, who presided over the biggest surge in “all of the above energy” in half a century; that coal continued to crash under Trump (I) despite his promises; and that Biden oversaw new all-time highs in LNG exports and U.S. petroleum production. But at least 90% of Americans don’t know anything at all about these facts. In the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, no one is digging through PDFs and Excel files from the EIA. From that 2023 issue of Cold Eye Earth:

Americans mistakenly believe political rhetoric governs energy policy, but the fact remains that the United States runs a free market energy system. And in a free market system, price and technology are in control. Correlations between the political perceptions of various Presidential administrations and actual, realized energy outcomes remain exceedingly low, and in many cases negative. Yes, the EPA (created by Richard Nixon!) has churned out regulations for a half-century and American presidents can certainly bend both the discourse, and the regulatory state, in their preferred direction. But it’s truly remarkable to consider how the last four Presidents, in this century, oversaw energy outcomes that blatantly defied commonplace public perceptions. And these were not marginal outcomes, but central, large scale outcomes.

There’s additional confusion because many people who do take an interest in energy are not just over-persuaded by words, or symbolic actions, but do not see or understand scale. They think that when Biden cancelled the KXL pipeline that it was a momentous event. Indeed, both the political right and the left had reactions to the announcement totally out of scale or proportion to the policy. Same too with the Biden administration’s approval of the Willow project in Alaska. These actions were almost entirely symbolic, and barely show up on a map of the U.S. energy system. The U.S. energy complex is a vast, sprawling juggernaut of enormous production, consumption, and exports. And this is what Talarico more cleverly, more astutely understands. Should he win that Texas senate seat, he will have virtually no impact on the future of U.S. energy which will roll onward, like a big wheel.