Trump attacks U.S. climate policy to help oil and gas
A series of executive orders sought to dismantle an array of key U.S. climate policies. Some will have limited impact, others could be highly damaging.

On his first day in office, President Trump moved quickly to attack the pillars of U.S. climate policy, repealing a long list of federal policies promoting renewable energy, while at the same time, issuing orders aimed at turbocharging drilling for oil and gas.
“We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have: the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth. And we are going to use it,” Trump said during his inauguration speech.
As in his first term, Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement. He also issued an order revoking any financial commitments made under the UNFCCC.
He signed an executive order that freezes new offshore wind lease sales and may result in the termination of existing leases. The move throws billion-dollar investments into doubt. “We’re not going to do the wind thing,” Trump said on Monday. “Big ugly windmills, they ruin your neighborhood.”
He dismantled the social cost of greenhouse gases, a way of incorporating the negative impacts of climate change in major governmental decisions. That could broadly skew federal policymaking in a murkier direction.
He ordered the end of the “EV mandate,” an incorrect description for a series of policies aimed at transitioning the auto sector off of fossil fuels over time. There is no mandate to purchase EVs. Trump rescinded a non-binding executive order from the Biden era that aimed to have half of all cars sold in 2030 be electric vehicles.
A federal subsidy of $7,500 per EV sold — contingent upon it being at least partially built in the U.S. — was passed into law by Congress, and cannot be undone by an executive order. In the short run, he may succeed in cutting off some funding for EV charging infrastructure.
Meanwhile, there are also federal regulations enacted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that require automakers to steadily improve the fuel efficiency of the cars they sell. Undoing those regulations requires a lengthy rule-making process; attempting to cut corners — that will open the Trump administration up to legal challenges.
The U.S. auto industry is not exactly thrilled at the move. Automakers have invested tens of billions of dollars’ worth of investment into EV and battery manufacturing, and they want to continue to grow their EV sales, despite Trump’s policies.
Representatives of the gas industry celebrated Trump’s return to office.
“We applaud President Trump’s decisive action to maximize the benefits from our nation’s abundant and essential energy and to protect consumer choice for each and every American,” said American Gas Association President and CEO Karen Harbert.
Energy “emergency”
Trump also declared a “national energy emergency,” blaming the Biden administration for its “harmful and shortsighted policies” that have led to “inadequate energy supply and infrastructure.”
As a practical matter, it’s not clear that the emergency declaration has any immediate impact. The order directs federal agencies to review what emergency powers they might have to increase energy production. Experts speculate that the Trump administration could use this authority to curtail environmental permitting for new energy infrastructure.
The move could speed up leases for oil and gas drilling. But few experts see U.S. oil and gas production, already at historic levels, moving much higher due to the depletion of reserves and because of the industry’s focus on keeping spending in check.
“Despite President Trump’s intentions, a significant uptick in US oil production is highly unlikely,” Matthew Bernstein, VP, Upstream Research at Rystad Energy, an Oslo-based energy consultancy, said in a note. “The ‘drill, baby, drill’ mantra overestimates the industry’s willingness to prioritize growth over investor returns in light of Tier 1 inventory depletion in core oil basins after 2030.”
He is seeking to open up federal land in the Arctic for drilling. But previous auctions of land on environmentally sensitive federal land in Alaska were a bust — the latest auction received no bids from any companies, despite the hype. Against that negative backdrop, it’s not clear that moves to open up Alaska for drilling will achieve much.
The “emergency” declaration also defies logic. The U.S. is already the largest producer of oil and gas in the world, and the largest combined exporter. There’s no conceivable way to describe American fossil fuel production levels as to be so inadequate that they constitute some kind of “emergency.” And if there was a supply emergency, the goal of exporting even more hardly makes sense. Moreover, his emergency declaration omits wind and solar when defining what constitutes “energy”, a curious oversight if the objective is to produce more energy.
Critics note that at the same time, Trump is ignoring the real crisis.
“This unprecedented move seeks to expand fossil fuel production under the false pretext of addressing an ‘energy crisis,’ while ignoring the real emergency: the escalating impacts of climate change,” Lauren Pagel, the policy director of the environmental NGO Earthworks, said in a statement. “With record-high oil and gas production, this declaration is a gross misuse of executive power. True energy security lies in clean, renewable solutions—not more fossil fuels.”
Long-term damage to climate policy
Many of Trump’s executive orders are more noise than they are tangible policy changes, but others could inflict significant damage on U.S. climate action.
Trump halted the disbursement of some federal funds under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, two key pieces of legislation passed during the Biden administration. That puts around $300 billion in green energy funding into limbo.
More durable action could come if Congress acts to repeal provisions in those Biden-era laws. That piece of legislation is expected later this year as part of a much larger tax package.
One little-publicised but potentially highly significant executive order directed the new head of the EPA to assess the legality of a 2009 declaration by the EPA that deemed CO2 and other greenhouse gases to be threats to public health. The so-called “endangerment finding” was a landmark decision from the EPA, and it has been the foundation upon which many climate regulations have been built. If the Trump EPA rescinds the endangerment finding, a lot of climate policy could go out the window.
“Just as the 2009 Finding cascaded throughout the entire U.S. economy from mobile sources to stationary ones (including power plants and oil wells), its elimination could potentially undercut rules derived from it, ending the explicit regulation of GHGs as ‘pollutants’ under the [Clean Air Act],” ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based energy analysis firm, wrote in a note to clients.
That move will take some time to play out as it will need to go through a formal process.
Further action at the EPA is likely in the coming weeks, and while they will be time-consuming, they will likely carry much more weight than Trump’s Day 1 executive orders.
Trump’s EPA will begin rule-making processes on an endless list of issues. As previously mentioned, he will target fuel economy regulations on cars and trucks. The EPA will likely also begin rolling back a series of regulations on power plants.
In order to get going, Trump still needs to get his top personnel into place. But his appointments have not been subtle. The nominee to lead EPA, Lee Zeldin, does not have environmental expertise, and is widely seen as Trump’s choice to lead the agency because he will pursue an agenda of deregulation.
Other choices are more explicitly from the industries they are supposed to regulate. Trump has tapped executives from the chemical industry to oversee EPA’s chemical safety division. The EPA’s second in command will be a lawyer who represented corporate clients fighting against asbestos regulation.
LNG
In a highly anticipated move, Trump lifted the LNG permitting “pause” put into place a year ago by the Biden administration. Although it was widely expected, it does not mean that the Department of Energy will immediately issue permits to new LNG projects. But it does kickstart that agency review process.
Several proposed LNG projects could benefit from the move, including Venture Global’s CP2 project and Commonwealth LNG, both located in southwest Louisiana. Energy Transfer’s Lake Charles LNG, just a bit north from there, also needs a new permit.
But U.S. LNG is not entirely out of the woods. If Trump’s Department of Energy hastily greenlights new permits, those could be challenged in federal court. The eleventh-hour Biden DOE report in December, which warned about the climate and economic harms of LNG, could give ammunition to opponents of LNG.
Additionally, many projects still face legal challenges over permits already issued. Several court decisions last year dealt major setbacks to multiple projects, and in doing so, sent shockwaves through the LNG industry. Trump will not be able to entirely wipe away all legal obstacles for the LNG industry.
Still, he will do all he can. He appears to be attempting to bully the European Union into buying more LNG and he has threatened to hit the continent with tariffs unless they do.
“The one thing they can do quickly is buy our oil and gas,” Trump said on Monday, referring to the EU. “We will straighten that out with tariffs, or they have to buy our oil and gas.”
While some European policymakers have suggested that they could avoid Trump’s wrath by committing to buying more LNG, in reality EU demand for LNG is in long-term decline. In any event, any purchases would need to be done by private companies, not governments.
On balance, his efforts to push through new LNG projects may succeed in getting a few new terminals off the ground. But that is not welcome news to communities that will see more drilling as a result of higher levels of gas exports.
“Trump’s executive order is a punch in the gut of every Pennsylvanian including those who voted for his empty promises,” Karen Feridun, cofounder of Better Path Coalition, a Pennsylvania NGO, said in a statement. “They didn’t vote for contaminated water, dirty air, climate-enhanced floods and droughts, fires and explosions, lost property value, and sick kids, but that’s the blow this order delivers.”