Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, said that his constituents are feeling optimistic once again about the future of the oil and gas industry in his district and beyond.

The Republican represents parts of central Texas that are critical to the industry, including the Permian Basin, as the Trump administration has famously promised to “drill, baby, drill.”

“Think about the hardworking men and women of the Permian Basin, or the Bakken or the Marcellus, or any other producing area. They were demonized. President Biden said, ‘What you do is evil. You producing oil and gas is evil.’ I mean, they basically demonized them,” he told Fox News Digital in a recent interview.

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“So, the outlook was pretty bleak in a lot of places. What President Trump has said is, ‘I hear you, I appreciate you, and we are going to make you and your job the centerpiece of the American economy. We’re going to bring that economy back using the work that you’re doing.’ So the outlook was pretty bleak for a couple of years. And it’s a lot better now.” 

Pfluger touted how the Congressional Review Act, recently signed by President Donald Trump, ended what is considered a tax on natural gas and petroleum production for “waste emissions” put in place during the Biden administration, an effort the Texas congressman helped to lead.

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“So, what President Biden did, both in the [Inflation Reduction Act] and also through the rules that were promulgated by the EPA, was to overreach, and they certainly started to tax the emissions that you see in production of oil and gas – that you see in the transmission of natural gas – that you see in the whole industry,” the Republican said. 

“It didn’t give credit to the industry for the gains that had already been made to reduce emissions over the past decade, which have been very impressive more than any other developed nation in the world,” he added.

“We want to undo the red tape, undo the bureaucratic morass that the Biden administration basically waged war on the industry. They wanted to make it harder to produce affordable, reliable energy. They wanted to tax it. They wanted to make it more expensive,” the lawmaker said. 

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Looking forward, the congressman stressed the importance of codifying the president’s executive orders on energy into law through Congress, as well as creating a “structure” where the industry can thrive in the long term, including setting up a system to make sure a project like the Keystone XL Pipeline cannot be quickly shot down by future administrations.

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“Let’s give people the predictability so that they can invest where we get caught up. And this is the biggest complaint I get, not just in my district but around the country, is that it’s not predictable and they have to compete with the government and they don’t know when the government is going to put a halt to something that they put billions of dollars into,” he said.