President-elect Donald Trump announced his nominations to lead key offices tasked with delivering his campaign promise of cutting fossil fuel regulations and increasing oil and natural gas production to lower energy prices and inflation.
During his campaign, as we’ve detailed, Trump vowed to exit the “horribly unfair” and “disastrous” Paris Agreement, which he will be able to do more quickly the second time around. His agenda also includes reversing environmental rules limiting carbon emissions and other pollution from vehicles and power plants.
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To achieve his promise to “drill, baby, drill,” Trump plans to expedite the approval of federal permits and leases, open new public land for drilling, approve natural gas pipeline projects and undo a temporary pause on approvals for new liquefied natural gas projects. He has also said he would claw back any unspent funds from President Joe Biden’s signature climate change law, the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides billions to boost clean energy production, improve energy efficiency and encourage electric vehicle adoption.
Reuters reported on Dec. 16 that Trump’s transition team recommends undoing many of the Biden administration’s plans to support EVs. This includes ending requirements that federal agencies purchase EVs, redirecting money away from building charging stations and terminating the IRA’s $7,500 EV tax credit. The team calls for rolling back fuel economy and vehicle emissions standards to 2019 levels, among other policy recommendations.
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Trump’s picks to accomplish many of these goals — Lee Zeldin for the Environmental Protection Agency, Doug Burgum for the Department of the Interior and Chris Wright for the Department of Energy — will need to go through confirmation hearings in the Senate, a process that can begin before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.
We reviewed what each has said about climate change and the environment.
U.S. & World
Lee Zeldin, EPA
On Nov. 11, Trump announced Lee Zeldin, an attorney, Army veteran and former congressman, as his choice to head the EPA, the agency responsible for protecting human health and the environment. If confirmed, he would be in a position to relax the agency’s vehicle emissions standards and rollback the Biden administration’s more stringent regulations on power plants, which particularly target coal-fired plants.
A native of New York, Zeldin represented areas of Long Island, first as a state senator, from 2011 to 2014, and then as a House representative from 2015 to 2023. While he has supported some legislation that protects the environment, particularly for his home district, he has limited experience in environmental policy and his record on climate change issues has been described as mixed.
While in Congress, Zeldin participated in bipartisan efforts to preserve and restore the Long Island Sound, an estuary between New York and Connecticut important for commercial fishing, tourism and other economic development. He also worked to prevent the sale and development of Plum Island, an 840-acre federal island in the Sound. In 2018, he opposed a proposal by Trump’s Interior Department to open up coastlines, including Long Island, to oil and gas drilling.
Zeldin did not get involved in House committees working on environmental policy (he was part of the Foreign Affairs and Financial Services committees). Still, he participated in some related caucuses, including the Congressional Estuary Caucus, the Long Island Sound Caucus, the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus and the Conservative Climate Caucus. The latter, created in 2021, acknowledges on its website that the “climate is changing” and that “decades of a global industrial era that has brought prosperity to the world has also contributed to that change.” The group further states that with innovation, “fossil fuels can and should be a major part of the global solution,” and aims to “fight against radical progressive climate proposals.”
In 2014, Lee told the editorial board of Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, that he was “not sold yet” on climate change being a serious problem and that it “would be productive if we could get to what is real and what is not real.”
Zeldin’s involvement in environmental issues in Congress was reportedly the result of efforts from his constituents following Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Areas he represented in Long Island were hit hard by the storm. Long Island’s coastal communities, which include popular beaches on Fire Island, the Hamptons and Montauk, have and will continue to be impacted by sea level rise, coastal erosion, warmer temperatures and severe storms — all of which can affect local businesses and the economy.
In a 2016 episode of a climate change docuseries — in which Zeldin verbally committed to joining the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus — he acknowledged that the threat of climate change was “very real” for his district. “I think that there is more of an awareness and a willingness to recognize that climate change is real,” Zeldin said, “and Congress is more and more open-minded toward identifying those solutions.”
Zeldin’s involvement in these efforts didn’t necessarily translate into support for bills protecting the environment. In his eight years in Congress, he cast 203 “anti-environment” votes and 32 “pro-environment” votes, according to the environmental group League of Conservation Voters, which gave him a lifetime score of 14%.
Among many other votes, Zeldin voted against the Inflation Reduction Act; against creating an office of climate resilience in the White House; in favor of cutting environmental funding, including to the EPA; and in favor of removing the U.S. from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Exiting the U.N. framework — which failed in 2022, but may resurface in a second Trump administration – goes beyond the act of withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement and would make it much harder to rejoin the accord.
The League of Conservation Voters’ scorecard included two of Zeldin’s votes in favor of actions designed to protect people from pollution caused by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, so-called “forever” chemicals that break down very slowly in the environment. One of those bills would have required the EPA to set a drinking water standard for certain PFAS, although Zeldin did vote against an amendment to that bill that would have prohibited companies from releasing unlimited amounts of PFAS into bodies of water. (The Biden EPA has since taken additional action on PFAS, including finalizing a drinking water standard for six of the chemicals in April.)
Zeldin got Trump’s attention by becoming one of his more loyal defenders during the president-elect’s 2019 impeachment. In 2022, backed by Trump, Zeldin ran unsuccessfully for governor of New York. During that campaign, he proposed to lower energy costs and create jobs by reversing a state ban on fracking and approving new pipelines. He also opposed a 2021 law that set a goal for all new passenger cars and trucks sold in the state to be zero-emissions by 2035.
In a statement announcing the nomination, Trump praised Zeldin’s legal background and his loyalty to his “America First” policies. “He will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet,” Trump wrote.
In response to Trump’s intention to nominate him, Zeldin pledged in a Nov. 11 post on X to “restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs,” adding, “We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.” (It’s worth noting, however, that the number of motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs under Biden, as of November, were higher than at any point under Trump.)
“Day 1 and the first 100 days, we have the opportunity to roll back regulations that are forcing businesses to be able to struggle,” Zeldin told Fox News later the same day. “There are regulations that the left wing of this country have been advocating through regulatory power that ends up causing businesses to go in the wrong direction.”
Doug Burgum, Department of the Interior
On Nov. 15, Trump announced former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who has close ties to fossil fuel industry executives, as his pick to lead the Interior Department, which is responsible for managing federal lands, minerals and waters, including leases for oil and gas drilling.
Burgum is also slated to lead Trump’s National Energy Council, created to “oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE by cutting red tape,” and regulations, according to Trump’s statement. The new council will work with all agencies and departments involved in energy permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation and transportation, Trump added.
Burgum, a software investor and former Microsoft executive who had a short run as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2023, doesn’t deny that the planet is warming, but has downplayed the problem and argued that innovation alone will solve it.
In an interview with CNN in July 2023 he acknowledged “the climate is changing” but avoided answering whether he believed it was caused by human activity or the burning of fossil fuels. (He also remained quiet when a similar question was asked during the first debate for the Republican primary.)
“It’s not about climate change that we need be worried about,” he said during the second Republican presidential primary debate in September 2023. “It’s about the Biden climate policies that are actually the existential threat to America’s future.”
North Dakota ranks third nationwide in crude oil reserves and production and relies on the industry for jobs and revenue. During his two terms as governor, which started in 2016, Burgum built alliances with oil and gas companies that supported him financially and politically. He has a longstanding relationship with Harold G. Hamm, the billionaire chairman of Continental Resources, a giant oil company and the largest leaseholder in the Bakken oil field in North Dakota and Montana. Hamm has contributed to Burgum’s campaigns for governor, his company donated to the super PAC that supported Burgum’s run for president and he invested $250 million in a pipeline project championed by Burgum. Burgum’s family also leases 200 acres of land to Continental for oil and gas extraction, which has resulted in up to $50,000 in royalties since late 2022, according to a CNBC report, based in part on Burgum’s financial disclosure statement.
These ties have been useful for Trump. In April, Burgum, who endorsed Trump in January, helped put together a dinner with oil and gas executives at Mar-a-Lago. Based on anonymous sources, the Washington Post reported that during the dinner, Trump suggested the group should raise $1 billion for his campaign — a “deal” for helping the industry, including by reversing drilling restrictions in Alaska and offering more oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico.
In 2017, Burgum created North Dakota’s first Department of Environmental Quality to protect the environment. “Preserving our natural resources for current and future generations is a top priority,” he said at the time. And in 2021, during a conference with the oil industry, he announced a goal for the state to be carbon-neutral, or to offset all CO2 emissions, by 2030.
He often summarizes his approach to climate change with the phrase “innovation over regulation,” casting carbon neutrality as an economic opportunity that allows for the continued use of fossil fuels. He is particularly supportive of carbon capture, utilization and storage technologies, which trap carbon dioxide emissions before they are released into the atmosphere and either use the gas or store it deep underground. (Other technologies can remove CO2 directly from the air.)
“We can reach carbon neutrality in the state of North Dakota by 2030 without a single mandate, without any additional regulation. We can get there just through the innovation and the different geology that we have,” Burgum said in an event with the secretary of energy in 2021, noting that his state has 252 billion tons of underground storage capacity.
When the CO2 is stored, carbon capture technologies can reduce emissions and combat climate change. But the technology remains expensive and is not used yet at scale. According to a 2023 Congressional Budget Office report, only 15 carbon capture facilities existed in the U.S, as of September of that year, capable of capturing up to about 0.4% of the nation’s annual CO2 emissions, with nearly all of the captured CO2 pumped into oil wells to enhance oil recovery. Even if all of the 121 other facilities in development came to fruition, the report added, carbon capture would account for only about 3% of the country’s emissions.
Scientists view carbon capture as an important tool for cutting emissions from the hardest-to-decarbonize industries, such as steel and cement. But given the high costs and other challenges, it’s not considered a very viable option for reducing the bulk of the world’s carbon emissions.
The former governor championed an $8 billion pipeline project backed by Republican megadonors that include Hamm’s Continental. The pipeline would go through five states, capture CO2 from ethanol plants and bring it to North Dakota to be stored. This and two other underground pipeline projects have faced concerns from landowners, who resist having CO2 flowing under their property or fear losing their lands by eminent domain.
Burgum says he supports an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy that includes both fossil fuels and renewable sources, but he often criticizes funding for alternative fuels. He has said, for example, that funds for electric vehicles included in the IRA subsidize China, even though the investments are designed to build out American capacity. The IRA, notably, also provided significant support for carbon capture and storage.
Burgum supports Trump’s idea of trying to lower energy prices by increasing oil and gas production. As we have explained, this is unlikely to be very effective, especially long term since prices are set in a global market and are subject to global supply and demand. Last year, he joined Republican governors urging Biden to “unleash American energy” and end regulations “restricting domestic production.”
“Our economy is being crushed by Biden’s energy policies, which are raising the cost of every product you buy, not just the gasoline at the pump,” he said during the first Republican presidential primary debate in August 2023. “Our future is unlimited, but we’ve got to focus on innovation, not regulation. We’ve got to cut the red tape.”
As we’ve written, the U.S. has been producing crude oil at record levels for two consecutive years. U.S. presidents, we’ve explained, have little control over the price people pay for gasoline. Gasoline prices increased after the pandemic as global demand for oil increased and as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Chris Wright, Energy Department
Trump announced on Nov. 18 that he had selected Chris Wright, the CEO of Liberty Energy, a fracking and oilfield services company based in Denver, to lead the Energy Department. As energy secretary, Wright would be responsible for the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, oversee energy conservation programs, make decisions about liquified natural gas export permits and lead research at the department’s 17 national laboratories.
Wright, who describes himself as a shale gas pioneer and “tech nerd turned entrepreneur,” trained as an engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley and has been in the fracking business since the early 1990s, which is the source of his fortune. Similar to Burgum, Wright is close to Hamm, the billionaire founder of Continental Resources, and serves as a director of a lobbying group Hamm founded.
Wright accepts that climate change is occurring, but argues that its effects are being exaggerated and that the world has a moral imperative to continue using fossil fuels to lift people out of poverty.
“Climate change is a real and global challenge that we should and can address,” he wrote in an introductory letter to a report his company published this year. “However, representing it as the most urgent threat to humanity today displaces concerns about more pressing threats of malnutrition, access to clean water, air pollution, endemic diseases, and human rights, among others.”
“There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either,” he said in a video he posted on LinkedIn in 2023. The “term carbon pollution is outrageous,” he added.
In making his case that people are overly concerned about climate change, Wright has sometimes trafficked in common climate myths and misled about the science. When talking about the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, for example, his company’s report calls CO2 “plant food” and focuses on its benefits — “increased agricultural productivity and a significant increase in global plant matter, grasses, trees, and plankton.”
As we’ve written, the notion that CO2 is “plant food” is commonly spread by those who deny the reality of climate change or minimize its impact. More CO2 is not good for all plants and some changes that come with it, like drought and heat, are frequently harmful to plants. The argument is also a form of cherry-picking, as it ignores many profoundly negative consequences of climate change.
“Fortunately, to date,” the Liberty Energy report also reads, “there is no observed increase in the key extreme weather events: hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and weather-related drought.” Wright recently claimed the same in a LinkedIn post, citing a table from chapter 12 of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
Jim Kossin, a climate scientist and an author of the cited chapter in the IPCC report, told us in an email that focusing on the single table, which describes whether detectable climate change trends have emerged, is “very misleading.”
“The requirements for formal detection are very strict and can only provide a yes or no answer. But the effects of climate change are not described by a binary yes or no answer,” he explained. Detection and emergence can depend more on available data than on actual physical processes, Kossin added. “This is a data problem and does NOT indicate a lack of trend. It merely states that the data aren’t good enough to pass the strict requirements for formal detection,” he wrote.
Indeed, elsewhere in the IPCC report, the overall message about climate change and its effects on extreme weather is very different from what Wright conveys.
“It is an established fact that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions have led to an increased frequency and/or intensity of some weather and climate extremes since pre-industrial time,” a summary finding in the chapter on extreme weather reads, adding that observed changes and their attribution to human activity has strengthened since the last report in 2014, “in particular for extreme precipitation, droughts, tropical cyclones and compound extremes (including dry/hot events and fire weather).”
Kossin said that the IPCC reports are “massive” and “can be complicated to navigate,” which “makes it easier to cherry pick from them to suit an agenda.”
“The use of the table without providing any other context is cherry picking in its purest sense,” he wrote.
In written testimony before Congress in April and in his LinkedIn post, Wright again emphasized the perks of global warming, citing a 2021 Lancet Planetary Health paper to argue that increases in heat-related deaths are “more than offset” by a reduction in cold-related deaths. The paper itself, however, cautions that while “global warming might slightly reduce net temperature-related deaths in the short term … in the long run, climate change is expected to increase the mortality burden.” The senior author of the study told us her work was “commonly misinterpreted by climate deniers.”
Wright’s foundation, Bettering Human Lives, preaches that access to fossil fuels, which the website describes as “low-impact, affordable” energy, can provide “a pathway out of poverty.”
It’s true that cheap energy is important and a social good. But as we explained when addressing similar arguments from former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, it’s misleading to suggest fossil fuels are the only or best option, especially now that there are alternatives in wind and solar that are cost effective and have much smaller carbon footprints.
“We know that fossil fuels have all of these other problems that renewable energy doesn’t have. And so for the future, there’s really no reason to continue burning fossil fuels,” Texas A&M climate scientist Andrew Dessler told us. That includes not only the heat-trapping carbon emissions that will further warm the planet, but also things such as particle air pollution, which in 2018 accounted for as much as 18% of all global deaths in 2018.
Wright describes renewable energy sources such as wind and solar as “unreliable and costly,” although he has invested in newer forms of geothermal and nuclear energy.
In a commentary piece published before the election, Wright said Republicans should respond to net-zero pledges — which he called “economic suicide” and “unachievable” — with the concept of “zero energy poverty.” This, he explained, “can be realized by unleashing our vast natural resources” to “deliver a future in which no one would struggle to afford their utility bills.”
Echoing arguments used by Trump during the campaign, Wright went on to claim that net-zero “requires curtailing freedom and massively growing government, as evidenced by bans on gas-powered cars, natural gas appliances, and the forced closure of reliable electricity plants – all of which are driving widespread economic pain.”
As we’ve written, while the Biden administration issued new energy efficiency standards for gas stoves and regulations reducing carbon emissions and other pollutants from cars and trucks, there are no bans on gas-powered vehicles or on gas cooking stoves. In terms of closing existing power plants, the Biden administration’s power plant rule only applies to coal-fired plants intending to operate long-term, as we’ve written. Under the regulation, those plants would need to use technology such as carbon capture to cut 90% of their carbon emissions by 2032 to continue running.
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