Loyalists selected for important roles have offered staunch support to fossil fuels and downplayed climate crisis
Donald Trump’s cabinet picks have been eclectic and often controversial but a unifying theme is emerging, experts say, with the US president-elect’s nominees offering staunch support to fossil fuels and either downplaying or denying the climate crisis caused by the burning of these fuels.
Trump ran on promises to eviscerate “green new scam” climate policies and to “drill, baby, drill” for more oil and gas, and his choices to run the major organs of the US government echo such sentiments, particularly his picks relating to the environment, with Lee Zeldin chosen as the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Chris Wright as energy secretary and Doug Burgum as interior secretary.
“With these choices it looks like Project 2025 is back with full force, and it will be the blueprint for the Trump administration 2.0,” said Daniel Esty, an environmental policy expert at Yale University, in reference to the rightwing manifesto that calls for the deletion of environmental and climate protections.
“Some people didn’t think Trump would actually try to execute this but it looks like he really is going to pull back on climate change commitments, against the tide of history.”
A standout nomination is that of Wright, chief executive of the Colorado-based gas drilling company Liberty Energy, who has no government experience but was a major donor to Trump’s campaign and has frequently appeared on Fox News, and various podcasts, to extol the use of fossil fuels.
“There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either,” Wright said in a video posted online last year. He has denied that extreme weather is worsened by rising global temperatures and said that any impacts are “clearly overwhelmed by the benefits of increasing energy consumption”. Wright has opined that “carbon pollution” and even “clean energy” are “nonsense terms” that have been “made up by alarmists”.
Trump has said in a statement that his team will slash “totally unnecessary regulation” and “drive US Energy Dominance, which will drive down Inflation, win the AI arms race with China (and others), and expand American Diplomatic Power to end Wars all across the World”. The statement did not mention the climate crisis or the need to move away from fossil fuels.
