This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. It is part two in a four-part series. Read part one here.

President Trump and Texas lawmakers are pushing to loosen the laws and liabilities governing the state's oil and gas industry and give companies a freer hand to "drill, baby, drill,” drawing mixed reactions from the heart of oil country.

On his first day back in office, the president declared a "national energy emergency." With demand for electricity rising, the U.S. would now be able to “do whatever you have to do to get out of that problem," he said.

His administration has moved quickly to strip away a number of regulations and liabilities that impacted the oil and gas industry, lifting endangered species protections in the Permian Basin, instructing the Army Corps to fast-track pipeline construction under the Clean Water Act and laying the groundwork to overhaul a bedrock law that requires the government to consider environmental consequences before approving infrastructure projects.

Industry executives are hailing the new administration as a breath of fresh air: an end, as oil executive Kirk Edwards of Odessa-based Latigo Petroleum told The Hill shortly before Trump's inauguration, to “these useless regulations that have been coming our way that we have to battle all the time.”

Energy experts have been widely dismissive of the idea that Trump can increase drilling, however. They say that a rising global price of oil — potentially driven by more upheaval abroad — is the only likely driver of further oil-sector expansion.

In regulatory terms, fossil fuel “investors have a friend in the White House,” Trey Cowan of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis told The Hill. But he added that markets, and not the White House, would determine whether there would be more drilling.

And personal injury attorneys, law enforcement and worker safety advocates alike warn that if the sector does expand — particularly in tandem with continued deregulation — it would mean a lot more deaths on the nation’s roads, construction sites and well pads, where some workers already report being pushed past the limits of safety.

The current efforts to limit liability in the oil and gas industry are part of a larger pattern of deregulation that has reshaped trucking and oil field work over the past four decades. In 1980, in the name of fighting inflation, Congress passed the Motor Carriers Act, which ended policies that had sought to protect truckers’ incomes by setting federal standards for rates and driving hours.

That change would eventually reshape life in the Permian Basin, where truckers haul everything from frac sand to toxic waste on narrow county roads ill-equipped for the boom. Over the past 45 years, the region has experienced an economic revival, and the oil and gas industry has recorded booming profits — as wages in the national trucking industry have plummeted by half.

The self-employed truckers who are the backbone of the industry entered a similar state of “debt peonage” to that later experienced by chicken farmers, said sociologist and former truck driver Michael Belzer of Wayne State University. “You ostensibly own the assets and they control the money. They control the freight,” he said. “You know the old song? ‘I owe my soul to the company store'?”

Under this paradigm, he said, truckers were pushed to work longer, harder and with higher risk of accidents. They have “no requirement to record their hours of work,” aside from federal requirements Belzer said can........

© The Hill