This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As President-elect Donald Trump puts together a team that will ramp up fossil fuel production in a country that is already pumping out more crude oil than any nation in history, critics are beginning to use a term once reserved for reviled foes.

Specifically, they are asking: Is the United States on its way to becoming a petrostate?

Jean Su, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s energy justice program, raised the question after Trump tapped Chris Wright, CEO of the Denver fracking company Liberty Energy, to lead the Department of Energy. Wright accepts that carbon emissions make the planet warmer, but contrary to the scientific consensus, he argues that the financial and quality-of-life benefits of increased fossil fuel production outweigh the risks. 

“Picking someone like Chris Wright is a clear sign that Trump wants to turn the US into a pariah petrostate,” Su said in an emailed statement. “He’s damning frontline communities and our planet to climate hell just to pad the already bloated pockets of fossil fuel tycoons.”

Climate scientist Michael Mann offered the same view in an essay soon after the election. “The United States is now poised to become an authoritarian state ruled by plutocrats and fossil fuel interests,” he wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “It is now, in short, a petrostate.”

Economists and political scientists point out that the United States does not fit the classical definition of a petrostate. Its economy is far more diverse than those of nations that are hamstrung by dependence on oil and natural gas. Moreover, the vast majority of the wealth generated by fossil fuel production here goes to private parties—not into government coffers.

And yet, experts concede that the United States behaves like a petrostate at times: for example, in its long-time inaction on climate change and, more recently, in the way it conducts foreign policy as the world’s leading oil and gas exporter. The fossil fuel industry’s influence is bound to be amplified under Trump, who does not view climate change as a serious problem and who describes “energy dominance” as a policy imperative. 

“The United States is acting a bit like, I wouldn’t necessarily say a petrostate, but like a state in which the hydrocarbon industry is a huge domestic constituency and source of employment and private sector revenues and now exports,” said Cullen Hendrix, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

The oil and gas industry—even by its own reckoning—currently accounts for just 8 percent of the US economy. Trump’s presidency will test whether competing interests—including businesses, states, and citizens that favor a clean energy transition—can exert enough influence to prevent the United States from going down the path that has hobbled the governance and economies of nations that are reliant on a single commodity.

Trump was not successful in permanently quashing the drive for clean energy in his first term. President Joe Biden was able to restore the US’s place in the Paris Agreement negotiations, reverse most of Trump’s deregulatory decisions and pass the nation’s first comprehensive climate legislation.

But Mann, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, argues that the risks are greater in Trump’s second term that wealthy fossil fuel interests will gain a durable advantage in the US political system.

“This time polluters and plutocrats have made sure they’re ready to hit the ground running,” Mann wrote in an email, pointing to the conservative policy roadmap, Project 2025, written by former Trump administration officials and supporters to guide his agenda. “They won’t waste any time at all eliminating the obstacles to a fossil fuel industry-driven agenda.”

True petrostates typically have state-owned oil companies and seek to maximize revenue as a matter of policy. In Azerbaijan, for example—the country where this year’s international climate talks took place—oil and gas output accounts for more than 90 percent of export revenue and over half of its national budget.

“I think it’s worth remembering that this is not that abnormal for the United States.”

In the United States, private and publicly traded oil and gas companies seek to influence the political process through lobbying and campaign contributions. In 2024, oil and gas industry political giving reached a record $219 million, overwhelmingly favoring Republicans and conservative groups, according to the watchdog group Open Secrets.

But the fossil fuel industry is also woven into the U.S. political fabric in ways that resemble the structure of petrostates. More than 60 percent of the $138 billion in taxes that the fossil fuel industry pays annually goes to state, local and tribal governments, according to a study by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Resources for the Future, or RFF.

Wyoming gets 59 percent of its state budget from fossil fuel revenue; North Dakota, 29 percent; and Alaska, 21 percent. Other states, though less reliant, take in staggering sums, led by Texas, at $14.6 billion annually; California, $7.8 billion; and Pennsylvania, $4.4 billion. And the money going into state coffers reflects the far larger impact the industry is having on state economies and jobs.

Because institutions like the Electoral College and the US Senate give states outsized power compared to their populations, fossil fuel-reliant regions can hold considerable sway over national politics and policy. For example, political observers say that part of the reason Vice President Kamala Harris talked little about the climate accomplishments of her administration during her presidential campaign, and instead repeated her pledge not to ban fracking, was a vain effort to win the swing state of Pennsylvania, the nation’s No. 2 natural gas producer.

The shape of current US climate policy was dictated by the political realities of the Senate, where it would be impossible to get the 66 votes needed to ratify a conventional climate treaty or 60 votes to pass substantive climate legislation. The Obama administration helped design a Paris agreement that contained no binding legal obligations, and therefore would not require Senate ratification. And the Biden administration’s climate legislation was an incentives package wrapped in a spending bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, which required only a bare majority for passage (and got one only with Harris’ tie-breaking vote). 

“The US has always had a hard time enacting climate policy,” said Daniel Raimi, a fellow at RFF who led its fossil fuel revenue study. “The Inflation Reduction Act was the exception rather than the rule, and it’s also a very unusual kind of climate policy. Most of the rest of the world use carbon pricing or regulatory tools. We couldn’t do any of that because of the political dynamics, so we went for the subsidy-based approach.”

But now, the Trump administration is intent on unraveling those policies. Trump’s job is made easier because the policies weren’t the product of a bipartisan consensus for climate action.

“I think it’s worth remembering that this is not that abnormal for the United States,” Raimi said. “Unfortunately, this is kind of where we have been for most of the last few decades.”

Fracking, which unleashed a flood of oil and gas on the US market beginning in 2010, laid the groundwork for Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.

Trump liked to say that the United States became energy independent on his watch, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia in oil production in 2018 and the following year, becoming a net exporter of energy for the first time in more than 60 years. But those trends began under Obama and have accelerated under Biden, with the United States producing 12.9 million barrels per day of crude oil in 2023, more than any other nation in history.

Mammoth facilities have been built in recent years to export liquefied natural gas, or LNG. And in 2015, Congress lifted a four-decade-old ban on US exports of crude oil, responding to the oil industry’s plea that it needed to be able to compete with petrostates for the nation’s own welfare. “Today’s vote starts us down the path to a new era of energy security,” American Petroleum Institute CEO Jack Gerrard said at the time. American producers, he said, “would be able to compete on a level playing field with countries like Iran and Russia, providing security to our allies.”

Biden put that concept into action after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, increasing LNG shipments to the European Union to undercut Russia’s role as a crucial energy supplier to the continent. For the past three years, the United States has provided half of the EU’s LNG supplies, a cushion that has helped allies cope with a precipitous fall in the energy supply from Russia.

Early this year, Biden paused approval of new LNG ports pending a study of their greenhouse gas impact—but a federal judge lifted that moratorium and Trump plans to end it altogether, potentially clearing the way for 20 proposed new LNG terminals. LNG could play a bigger foreign policy role, even if Trump should succeed in ending the Ukraine war “in 24 hours,” as he has promised.

“It seems clear that the second Trump administration is going to want to use this energy leverage to exact concessions from Europe on a variety of fronts,” Hendrix said. “It might be increasing military spending, or more military spending earmarked for U.S. arms exports, or more guarantees to purchase more U.S. exports generally.”

The EU may be ready to deal. The day after the election, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed that the EU might be able to head off Trump tariffs by agreeing to buy more LNG from the United States. 

A number of forces may work against the oil and gas industry’s interests during the new Trump administration.

Other industries may succeed in holding off some of the planned regulatory rollbacks, like auto manufacturers, who have invested billions of dollars in electric vehicle and battery plants in anticipation of the clean energy transition they see taking place globally.

States that have new clean energy projects or a long-term commitment to fighting climate change will make their voices heard. “We are going to move forward in the United States, state by state, county by county, city by city, in continuing our tremendous dynamic growth of our clean energy economy,” said Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington in a news conference after the election.

Environmentalists, landowners and fishing operations already are in court fighting the construction of new LNG terminals. Judges have ruled against three LNG projects so far this year, indicating Trump will not be able to make new ports appear on the Gulf Coast overnight.

And finally, some experts rightly acknowledge that Trump’s own energy policy vision may be at odds with itself. Trump frequently said he wanted to return to the “beautiful number” of $1.87 per gallon gasoline—where prices bottomed out during his final year in office.

Gasoline prices were so low in 2020, however, because the global economy had ground to a standstill due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Crude oil prices, now more than $74 per barrel, would have to plummet to $20 per barrel—as they did in 2020—to bring pump prices so low, experts say. That could stop “drill, baby, drill” in its tracks. Exxon Mobil has said its break-even point—the oil price at which it can cover its costs of production—is $35 per barrel; and Wells Fargo estimated last year that break-even for companies that frack in US shale basins is $54 per barrel.

The realities of the free market, as well as democratic institutions, may yet prevent the United States from slipping into the realm of petrostates. Nevertheless, the 2024 election has driven home to many how fossil fuel abundance has made the road to climate action harder in the United States.

“Imagine a United States that was as oil-starved as China,” Hendrix said. “You’d see a lot more sustained emphasis on renewables, going back to the 1990s, if not the 1980s.

“Instead, what we have is this kind of domestic political competition between a coalition that supports renewable energy and a coalition that supports fossil fuels,” he said. “And Trump’s election suggests to me that fossil fuels are the winners in the short term.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As President-elect Donald Trump puts together a team that will ramp up fossil fuel production in a country that is already pumping out more crude oil than any nation in history, critics are beginning to use a term once reserved for reviled foes.

Specifically, they are asking: Is the United States on its way to becoming a petrostate?

Jean Su, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s energy justice program, raised the question after Trump tapped Chris Wright, CEO of the Denver fracking company Liberty Energy, to lead the Department of Energy. Wright accepts that carbon emissions make the planet warmer, but contrary to the scientific consensus, he argues that the financial and quality-of-life benefits of increased fossil fuel production outweigh the risks. 

“Picking someone like Chris Wright is a clear sign that Trump wants to turn the US into a pariah petrostate,” Su said in an emailed statement. “He’s damning frontline communities and our planet to climate hell just to pad the already bloated pockets of fossil fuel tycoons.”

Climate scientist Michael Mann offered the same view in an essay soon after the election. “The United States is now poised to become an authoritarian state ruled by plutocrats and fossil fuel interests,” he wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “It is now, in short, a petrostate.”

Economists and political scientists point out that the United States does not fit the classical definition of a petrostate. Its economy is far more diverse than those of nations that are hamstrung by dependence on oil and natural gas. Moreover, the vast majority of the wealth generated by fossil fuel production here goes to private parties—not into government coffers.

And yet, experts concede that the United States behaves like a petrostate at times: for example, in its long-time inaction on climate change and, more recently, in the way it conducts foreign policy as the world’s leading oil and gas exporter. The fossil fuel industry’s influence is bound to be amplified under Trump, who does not view climate change as a serious problem and who describes “energy dominance” as a policy imperative. 

“The United States is acting a bit like, I wouldn’t necessarily say a petrostate, but like a state in which the hydrocarbon industry is a huge domestic constituency and source of employment and private sector revenues and now exports,” said Cullen Hendrix, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

The oil and gas industry—even by its own reckoning—currently accounts for just 8 percent of the US economy. Trump’s presidency will test whether competing interests—including businesses, states, and citizens that favor a clean energy transition—can exert enough influence to prevent the United States from going down the path that has hobbled the governance and economies of nations that are reliant on a single commodity.

Trump was not successful in permanently quashing the drive for clean energy in his first term. President Joe Biden was able to restore the US’s place in the Paris Agreement negotiations, reverse most of Trump’s deregulatory decisions and pass the nation’s first comprehensive climate legislation.

But Mann, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, argues that the risks are greater in Trump’s second term that wealthy fossil fuel interests will gain a durable advantage in the US political system.

“This time polluters and plutocrats have made sure they’re ready to hit the ground running,” Mann wrote in an email, pointing to the conservative policy roadmap, Project 2025, written by former Trump administration officials and supporters to guide his agenda. “They won’t waste any time at all eliminating the obstacles to a fossil fuel industry-driven agenda.”

True petrostates typically have state-owned oil companies and seek to maximize revenue as a matter of policy. In Azerbaijan, for example—the country where this year’s international climate talks took place—oil and gas output accounts for more than 90 percent of export revenue and over half of its national budget.

“I think it’s worth remembering that this is not that abnormal for the United States.”

In the United States, private and publicly traded oil and gas companies seek to influence the political process through lobbying and campaign contributions. In 2024, oil and gas industry political giving reached a record $219 million, overwhelmingly favoring Republicans and conservative groups, according to the watchdog group Open Secrets.

But the fossil fuel industry is also woven into the U.S. political fabric in ways that resemble the structure of petrostates. More than 60 percent of the $138 billion in taxes that the fossil fuel industry pays annually goes to state, local and tribal governments, according to a study by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Resources for the Future, or RFF.

Wyoming gets 59 percent of its state budget from fossil fuel revenue; North Dakota, 29 percent; and Alaska, 21 percent. Other states, though less reliant, take in staggering sums, led by Texas, at $14.6 billion annually; California, $7.8 billion; and Pennsylvania, $4.4 billion. And the money going into state coffers reflects the far larger impact the industry is having on state economies and jobs.

Because institutions like the Electoral College and the US Senate give states outsized power compared to their populations, fossil fuel-reliant regions can hold considerable sway over national politics and policy. For example, political observers say that part of the reason Vice President Kamala Harris talked little about the climate accomplishments of her administration during her presidential campaign, and instead repeated her pledge not to ban fracking, was a vain effort to win the swing state of Pennsylvania, the nation’s No. 2 natural gas producer.

The shape of current US climate policy was dictated by the political realities of the Senate, where it would be impossible to get the 66 votes needed to ratify a conventional climate treaty or 60 votes to pass substantive climate legislation. The Obama administration helped design a Paris agreement that contained no binding legal obligations, and therefore would not require Senate ratification. And the Biden administration’s climate legislation was an incentives package wrapped in a spending bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, which required only a bare majority for passage (and got one only with Harris’ tie-breaking vote). 

“The US has always had a hard time enacting climate policy,” said Daniel Raimi, a fellow at RFF who led its fossil fuel revenue study. “The Inflation Reduction Act was the exception rather than the rule, and it’s also a very unusual kind of climate policy. Most of the rest of the world use carbon pricing or regulatory tools. We couldn’t do any of that because of the political dynamics, so we went for the subsidy-based approach.”

But now, the Trump administration is intent on unraveling those policies. Trump’s job is made easier because the policies weren’t the product of a bipartisan consensus for climate action.

“I think it’s worth remembering that this is not that abnormal for the United States,” Raimi said. “Unfortunately, this is kind of where we have been for most of the last few decades.”

Fracking, which unleashed a flood of oil and gas on the US market beginning in 2010, laid the groundwork for Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.

Trump liked to say that the United States became energy independent on his watch, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia in oil production in 2018 and the following year, becoming a net exporter of energy for the first time in more than 60 years. But those trends began under Obama and have accelerated under Biden, with the United States producing 12.9 million barrels per day of crude oil in 2023, more than any other nation in history.

Mammoth facilities have been built in recent years to export liquefied natural gas, or LNG. And in 2015, Congress lifted a four-decade-old ban on US exports of crude oil, responding to the oil industry’s plea that it needed to be able to compete with petrostates for the nation’s own welfare. “Today’s vote starts us down the path to a new era of energy security,” American Petroleum Institute CEO Jack Gerrard said at the time. American producers, he said, “would be able to compete on a level playing field with countries like Iran and Russia, providing security to our allies.”

Biden put that concept into action after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, increasing LNG shipments to the European Union to undercut Russia’s role as a crucial energy supplier to the continent. For the past three years, the United States has provided half of the EU’s LNG supplies, a cushion that has helped allies cope with a precipitous fall in the energy supply from Russia.

Early this year, Biden paused approval of new LNG ports pending a study of their greenhouse gas impact—but a federal judge lifted that moratorium and Trump plans to end it altogether, potentially clearing the way for 20 proposed new LNG terminals. LNG could play a bigger foreign policy role, even if Trump should succeed in ending the Ukraine war “in 24 hours,” as he has promised.

“It seems clear that the second Trump administration is going to want to use this energy leverage to exact concessions from Europe on a variety of fronts,” Hendrix said. “It might be increasing military spending, or more military spending earmarked for U.S. arms exports, or more guarantees to purchase more U.S. exports generally.”

The EU may be ready to deal. The day after the election, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed that the EU might be able to head off Trump tariffs by agreeing to buy more LNG from the United States. 

A number of forces may work against the oil and gas industry’s interests during the new Trump administration.

Other industries may succeed in holding off some of the planned regulatory rollbacks, like auto manufacturers, who have invested billions of dollars in electric vehicle and battery plants in anticipation of the clean energy transition they see taking place globally.

States that have new clean energy projects or a long-term commitment to fighting climate change will make their voices heard. “We are going to move forward in the United States, state by state, county by county, city by city, in continuing our tremendous dynamic growth of our clean energy economy,” said Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington in a news conference after the election.

Environmentalists, landowners and fishing operations already are in court fighting the construction of new LNG terminals. Judges have ruled against three LNG projects so far this year, indicating Trump will not be able to make new ports appear on the Gulf Coast overnight.

And finally, some experts rightly acknowledge that Trump’s own energy policy vision may be at odds with itself. Trump frequently said he wanted to return to the “beautiful number” of $1.87 per gallon gasoline—where prices bottomed out during his final year in office.

Gasoline prices were so low in 2020, however, because the global economy had ground to a standstill due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Crude oil prices, now more than $74 per barrel, would have to plummet to $20 per barrel—as they did in 2020—to bring pump prices so low, experts say. That could stop “drill, baby, drill” in its tracks. Exxon Mobil has said its break-even point—the oil price at which it can cover its costs of production—is $35 per barrel; and Wells Fargo estimated last year that break-even for companies that frack in US shale basins is $54 per barrel.

The realities of the free market, as well as democratic institutions, may yet prevent the United States from slipping into the realm of petrostates. Nevertheless, the 2024 election has driven home to many how fossil fuel abundance has made the road to climate action harder in the United States.

“Imagine a United States that was as oil-starved as China,” Hendrix said. “You’d see a lot more sustained emphasis on renewables, going back to the 1990s, if not the 1980s.

“Instead, what we have is this kind of domestic political competition between a coalition that supports renewable energy and a coalition that supports fossil fuels,” he said. “And Trump’s election suggests to me that fossil fuels are the winners in the short term.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

By tapping former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin to head the Environmental Protection Agency, President-elect Donald Trump opted to put his planned radical rollback of climate policy in the hands of a staunch ally who is skilled at projecting an image of a moderate conservationist.

As a Republican representing a Long Island district “almost completely surrounded by water,” as Zeldin often said, he successfully fought in Congress for coastal resilience and nature preservation projects and expressed hope for bipartisan compromise on climate, calling it “a very important issue.”

But Zeldin never advanced any proposal to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and like other congressional Republicans in the Trump era, consistently voted against those proposals. He came closer than any Republican in 20 years to capturing his state’s highest office by campaigning on a pledge to overturn the state’s ban on fracking.

“I think at times he spoke moderately when it was convenient to do so, but I don’t think that’s the Lee Zeldin that New York has seen for at least the past four years,” said Sam Bernhardt, the New York-based political director for Food & Water Action. He thinks the most telling item in Zeldin’s record is his vote against certifying the 2020 election.

“He did that because Trump told him to, so I think we can extrapolate that most of Lee Zeldin’s work at EPA will likewise be things that Trump has told him to do,” Bernhardt said.

In a Fox News interview on Monday, shortly after his selection was announced, Zeldin made clear that the president-elect has given him a long list of regulations to roll back.

“The president was talking about unleashing economic prosperity through the EPA,” Zeldin said. “There are regulations that the left wing of this country have been advocating through regulatory power that end up causing businesses to go in the wrong direction. And President Trump, when he called me up, gosh, he was rattling off 15, 20, different priorities.”

The agency that has spent the past four years spearheading policy to cut greenhouse gas pollution throughout the US economy would shift gears within “the first 100 days,” said Zeldin, into becoming a vehicle for Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.

Zeldin is a markedly different choice than the leaders Trump chose to head up the EPA during his first term. Trump’s first EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, was an Oklahoma attorney general who had sued the agency repeatedly, leading Republican states’ push-back against President Barack Obama’s climate initiatives.

But upon arriving in Washington, Pruitt quickly became entangled in multiple controversies—over his travel practices, his use of government employees for personal errands, and his relationships with lobbyists. Pruitt resigned under pressure and was replaced by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, a behind-the-scenes player on Capitol Hill and in the EPA. He stirred less drama as he pursued the Trump deregulatory agenda, ultimately rolling back more than 100 environmental rules.

Zeldin comes to the EPA not as a combatant or a bureaucrat, but as a politician with a record of successfully delivering Republican messages in Democratic strongholds. Trump trusted Zeldin to act as a surrogate for him on the campaign trail—from Iowa at the beginning of the race through to Georgia and Pennsylvania at the end.

“He certainly is a savvy political operator,” said Frank Maisano, a senior principal at the law and lobbying firm Bracewell, which represents a range of energy-industry clients. 

“He wasn’t particularly well known for taking in-depth positions on EPA issues, but I’m not surprised that he gets a position like this,” Maisano said. “I’m certain what he’ll do is be a good leader, and a good spokesman for the president’s energy and environment agenda.”

Zeldin in recent years has advocated unleashing fossil fuel production without challenging climate science outright. That also sets him apart from Pruitt and to some extent, Wheeler, both of whom were proteges of one of Congress’ most outspoken climate science deniers, the late Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who died earlier this year.

Zeldin was one of 12 Republicans who voted with House Democrats in 2019 in favor of a ban on drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines.

In 2019, during a debate on the first climate legislation to reach the House floor in a decade, Zeldin praised the Democratic sponsors for “their intentions and advocacy” on a measure that sought to hold the Trump administration to the goals of the Paris Agreement. But he still reeled off the reasons why he agreed with Trump’s decision to exit: there had not been enough debate or study of its potential economic impact, the measure had never come before Congress for a vote and China and India should be forced to make greater cuts.

“We needed a better deal for the world and other countries to step up and do more, more transparency and debates, and a vote here in Congress,” Zeldin said. “That is in the best interests of all our constituents. Hopefully, we can agree on the numbers and a process going forward, and we can work together on a bipartisan basis.”

But no bipartisan effort would ever emerge in Congress to deal comprehensively with the need to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas pollution as aggressively as scientists say is needed to avoid catastrophic climate risk. Zeldin, like all Republicans in Congress, voted against the legislative solution that the Biden administration hit upon, the massive incentives and subsidies for clean energy contained in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

The future of the IRA is now unclear, with Trump about to regain the presidency and Republicans poised to take control of Congress. And the other crucial part of Biden’s climate agenda—regulations on vehicles, power plants, and the oil and gas industry—are on the chopping block. Zeldin has been given the axe.

Zeldin, a native of Suffolk County, became one of the youngest attorneys ever in New York State at the age of 23. He then served four years on active duty in the US Army, deploying to Iraq in 2006, and holding roles as an intelligence officer, a prosecutor, and a magistrate. Zeldin continues to serve as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve.

In 2020, he talked about the damage that Superstorm Sandy did in his district eight years earlier when he spoke out in favor of water resources development legislation that later became part of the omnibus budget bill Congress passed and Trump signed.

“The widespread devastation emphasized the dire need to ensure our communities were better prepared for the future,” Zeldin said, speaking in favor of prioritizing and increasing spending limits for dredging and coastal storm risk management projects along the Long Island coast.

Zeldin also helped lead a long and ultimately successful effort to preserve Plum Island on Long Island Sound, which has become a key habitat for birds, seals, fish and coral. The federally owned island had been at risk of being sold off for development.

He was one of 12 Republicans who voted with the majority of House Democrats in 2019 in favor of a ban on drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines, a measure that the Senate never acted on.

But there were limits to Zeldin’s advocacy of coastal protection. He unsuccessfully sponsored legislation in 2016 that sought to block presidents—in particular, Obama—from creating any national monuments in the exclusive economic zone along the coasts of the United States. “I do this on behalf of commercial fishermen on Long Island and throughout the nation who, like so many other hard-working Americans, are increasingly under assault from the executive overreach of this administration,” Zeldin said at the time.

Over his four terms in Congress, from 2015 to 2023, Zeldin generated a pro-environmental voting record of 14 percent, according to the League of Conservation Voters, or LCV. That’s a high score relative to other House Republicans (their average was 4 percent in the last Congress), but environmental advocates said it signaled a lack of concern over the issues that he would be in his purview at EPA.

“Trump made his anti-climate action, anti-environment agenda very clear during the campaign,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, LCV’s senior vice president for government affairs. “During the confirmation process, we would challenge Lee Zeldin to show how he would be better than Trump’s campaign promises or his own failing 14 percent environmental score if he wants to be charged with protecting the air we breathe and the water we drink, and finding solutions to climate change.”

If Zeldin’s past statements are any guide, he is likely to vow to protect clean air and water, even while touting the economic benefits of expanded fossil fuel development.

“We all have constituents who want access to clean air and clean water,” Zeldin said before his 2019 vote against holding Trump to the Paris Agreement goals. “It is something that, whether you are representing a district in Flint, Michigan, or you are in Tampa, Florida, or the east end of Long Island, we all want to advocate for that for our constituents.”

When he ran against Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022 in his bid for New York’s top office, Zeldin advocated overturning the fracking ban that had been enacted under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “If New York would reverse the Cuomo-Hochul ban on the safe extraction of resources under many parts of the state, jobs will be created, energy costs will go down, communities will be revitalized, and our state can prosper again,” Zeldin posted on Twitter during his campaign. 

Zeldin lost, but garnered more votes than any Republican who ran for the state’s top office since former Gov. Nelson Rockefeller 50 years earlier. Maisano said that message apparently resonated with many New Yorkers, who live on the same geological formation, the Marcellus Shale, as their neighbors to the south.

“In many cases, the fracking ban in New York has been a scourge, because Pennsylvania is reaping the benefits and New York is not reaping anything,” Maisano said.

Trump, who is now seeking to lift restrictions on all oil and gas development in the nation, said Zeldin “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, who once frequently called climate change a “hoax,” but dropped that rhetoric before his 2016 presidential run, has honed a message on environmental protection that has allowed him to successfully campaign on a pro-fossil fuel agenda at a time when polls showed swing voters preferred clean energy and climate action. In Zeldin, Trump has found someone to lead that agenda who is skilled at the same kind of messaging.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump prepare for their debate on Tuesday night, those who care about US action on climate change are bracing themselves for disappointment.

They know that at candidate forums and interviews—for presidential and down-ballot candidates alike—climate often doesn’t come up at all. Even worse, the few questions that do get asked are stuck on a controversy that science resolved long ago—is climate change real? As a result, debates provide little enlightenment on the difficult choices political leaders face as the costs of severe weather, heat and wildfire mount, and the clean energy future develops in a US economy caught up in a fossil fuel surge. 

Since his first run for president in 2016, Trump has easily deflected the soft climate questions tossed his way. He declares himself an avid environmentalist—”I believe very strongly in very, very crystal clear clean water and clean air,” he once said—while minimizing the severity of climate change. Virtually all scrutiny of Harris’ climate policy has focused on her once-stated support for a fracking ban, even though there is no legal authority for a US president to enact such a prohibition, and Harris abandoned the stand when she became President Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020.

Ahead of the debate, the Inside Climate News staff came up with questions that challenge the candidates’ past statements on energy policy and more accurately reflect the hard decisions the next president will face as the world’s leading oil and gas producer confronts its role in both aiding and addressing a planetary crisis.

Questions for Trump

1. Private companies have announced more than 300 major new clean energy projects and electric vehicle plants across the country based on the support they’re getting under the Inflation Reduction Act. This private investment is expected to create more than 100,000 jobs; Michigan, Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, and North Carolina each have 20 projects or more underway. You’ve said you would end the IRA subsidies. What would you do about the projects in these states that would be put at risk?

Context: The nonprofit group Environmental Entrepreneurs has tracked 334 new clean energy and vehicles project announcements in 40 states since passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, totaling $125 billion in investment, expected to create 109,000 jobs.

2. You take credit for making the United States energy independent during your presidency. But under the Biden/Harris administration, we are even more energy independent by any measure—our energy imports are lower now and our exports are higher; our energy consumption is lower now and production is higher. Aren’t you just promising more of the same? Would you lift the ban on oil imports from Russia, which rose dramatically during your presidency?

Context:

3. You have often said that wind energy is damaging to land, wildlife, and even human health, while making energy more expensive. But wind electricity now provides 10 percent of US electric power, with Texas far and away the leading state for wind farms. What is your plan for wind power as president and would you act to shut down the wind farms now operating?

Context: Wind energy can have impacts on wildlife and the environment, according to the Department of Energy, and federal authorities require developers of projects on federal land and water to analyze potential impacts and minimize them. Oil, gas, and coal development also have wildlife and environmental impacts, with one 2012 study showing that fossil fuel-generated electricity kills nearly 20 times more birds per gigawatt-hour than electricity generated by wind.

4. You have said rising sea levels would create more oceanfront property. But the changes already underway have meant flooding, erosion and damage to homes and businesses both on the coast and inland. With losses mounting and the federal flood insurance program more than $20 billion in debt to taxpayers, should the U.S. government continue to insure the properties most at risk? And if not, what do you think the federal government should do about homes and businesses that can’t get private flood insurance, especially in your home state of Florida?

Context: In his August 12 interview with Elon Musk, Trump asserted that sea level is expected to rise one inch every 400 years, but a comprehensive 2022 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that sea levels on the US coast are on track to rise 10 inches in the next 30 years. NOAA projects the incidence of flooding in the US will increase tenfold as a result.

5. When you first ran for president, you promised to bring back coal jobs. But eight coal companies went bankrupt during your presidency and the United States lost 12,700 coal jobs—a decline of 25 percent. What is your plan to help coal workers? 

Context: The coal industry has been weakening steadily over more than a decade due to what most economists see as a sectoral decline in the industry due to competition from cheaper natural gas and renewable energy. Eight US coal companies went bankrupt between October 2018 and October 2019. Under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act—the main vehicle for President Joe Biden’s climate policy—coal states like Wyoming and West Virginia have been given a competitive advantage in attracting clean energy development projects and associated federal funding in order to address displaced workers.

Questions for Harris

1. As California attorney general, you took legal action against oil companies over oil spills and other pollution, and as a presidential candidate in 2019, you talked about the federal and state litigation against tobacco companies as a model of how to address fossil fuel companies’ role in the climate crisis. Do you believe the Justice Department should join with states taking action against oil companies over climate damages?

Context: In 1998, 52 state and territorial attorneys general signed a massive $200 billion agreement with the nation’s four largest tobacco companies to settle dozens of lawsuits they brought to recover their smoking-related health care costs. The next year, the Justice Department also filed suit against Big Tobacco and after years of legal wrangling and a nine-month trial, a federal judge in 2006 ruled that the manufacturers had violated the federal organized crime law, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. That litigation is ongoing 25 years later, as the industry continues to challenge remedies imposed by the court, which are designed to prohibit it from making false or deceptive claims about tobacco products. 

2. Despite the progress made on clean energy during the Biden administration, the US isn’t on track to hit the Paris climate agreement targets for greenhouse gas reductions. This not only endangers lives and property, it undermines US credibility in persuading other nations, especially China, to reduce their climate pollution. What would you do to change that? 

Context: The Climate Action Tracker, a nonprofit international research organization, projects that US greenhouse gas emissions are on track to be about one-third below 2005 levels by 2030, falling short of the Biden administration’s pledge to cut them in half. Another research organization, the Rhodium Group, reached a similar conclusion, calculating that to meet its Paris target, the United States would have to achieve a 6.9 percent emissions reduction every year from 2024 through 2030, more than triple the 1.9 percent drop seen in 2023. 

3. In 2019, you said that we “have to acknowledge the residual impact of fracking is enormous in terms of the health and safety of communities.” As president, what would you do to protect the health and safety of communities who are exposed to air pollution and water contamination caused by the fracking process?

Context: Almost 2,500 scientific papers have documented negative health impacts from fracking, according to the Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York. They include a 2022 Yale study showing Pennsylvania children who grew up within a mile of a natural gas well were twice as likely as other children to develop the most common form of juvenile leukemia, and a 2023 University of Pittsburgh study showing they were seven times as likely to suffer from lymphoma. The oil and gas industry has maintained high-pressure water fracturing for oil and gas production from underground shale formations is safe, but the industry has had to pay to provide new water supply for residents with contaminated wells. The issue is especially divisive in Pennsylvania, which became the nation’s second-largest natural gas producing state (after Texas) due to fracking, and is a key state in the presidential race.

4. Did you support President Biden’s move to pause further permitting of liquefied natural gas export facilities while the government assesses the potential climate impact? Now that a federal judge has ordered the administration to resume permitting, would you go forward with new LNG projects or seek to overturn the judge’s order?

Conext: Biden’s LNG permitting pause in January put into question the future of at least 17 terminals currently being considered along US coastlines to export natural gas overseas. The move was challenged by a coalition of Republican-led states and in July, a Trump-appointed federal judge ordered the administration to resume permitting LNG terminals. Although the Biden administration is appealing that order, on September 3, it approved a short-term expansion of one existing terminal’s permit to export from the Gulf of Mexico. 

5. Farm work is among the nation’s most dangerous occupations and has become even deadlier due to more intense and frequent heat waves driven by climate change. Nearly half of farmworkers nationwide are undocumented and face even greater risks because they’re afraid to complain about unsafe working conditions. Will you give these workers some form of legal status and implement a federal heat standard that ensures the health and safety of those exposed to dangerous heat conditions at work?

Context: Rising temperatures have prompted questions about whether employers should be required to provide shade, rest periods, and cool water to workers who face health risks because of extreme heat, particularly those who must work outdoors, like farmworkers and construction workers. After the heat-related death of a 38-year-old farmworker in Oregon during the historic 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, that state put new heat-protection rules in place. But Florida’s legislature and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis approved legislation early this year banning localities from establishing such rules. The Biden administration proposed the first federal worker heat protection standards in July, three years after the president first promised them. It will be up to the next president to decide whether to finalize that plan or abandon it in the face of certain legal challenges from business groups and their political allies.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump prepare for their debate on Tuesday night, those who care about US action on climate change are bracing themselves for disappointment.

They know that at candidate forums and interviews—for presidential and down-ballot candidates alike—climate often doesn’t come up at all. Even worse, the few questions that do get asked are stuck on a controversy that science resolved long ago—is climate change real? As a result, debates provide little enlightenment on the difficult choices political leaders face as the costs of severe weather, heat and wildfire mount, and the clean energy future develops in a US economy caught up in a fossil fuel surge. 

Since his first run for president in 2016, Trump has easily deflected the soft climate questions tossed his way. He declares himself an avid environmentalist—”I believe very strongly in very, very crystal clear clean water and clean air,” he once said—while minimizing the severity of climate change. Virtually all scrutiny of Harris’ climate policy has focused on her once-stated support for a fracking ban, even though there is no legal authority for a US president to enact such a prohibition, and Harris abandoned the stand when she became President Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020.

Ahead of the debate, the Inside Climate News staff came up with questions that challenge the candidates’ past statements on energy policy and more accurately reflect the hard decisions the next president will face as the world’s leading oil and gas producer confronts its role in both aiding and addressing a planetary crisis.

Questions for Trump

1. Private companies have announced more than 300 major new clean energy projects and electric vehicle plants across the country based on the support they’re getting under the Inflation Reduction Act. This private investment is expected to create more than 100,000 jobs; Michigan, Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, and North Carolina each have 20 projects or more underway. You’ve said you would end the IRA subsidies. What would you do about the projects in these states that would be put at risk?

Context: The nonprofit group Environmental Entrepreneurs has tracked 334 new clean energy and vehicles project announcements in 40 states since passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, totaling $125 billion in investment, expected to create 109,000 jobs.

2. You take credit for making the United States energy independent during your presidency. But under the Biden/Harris administration, we are even more energy independent by any measure—our energy imports are lower now and our exports are higher; our energy consumption is lower now and production is higher. Aren’t you just promising more of the same? Would you lift the ban on oil imports from Russia, which rose dramatically during your presidency?

Context:

3. You have often said that wind energy is damaging to land, wildlife, and even human health, while making energy more expensive. But wind electricity now provides 10 percent of US electric power, with Texas far and away the leading state for wind farms. What is your plan for wind power as president and would you act to shut down the wind farms now operating?

Context: Wind energy can have impacts on wildlife and the environment, according to the Department of Energy, and federal authorities require developers of projects on federal land and water to analyze potential impacts and minimize them. Oil, gas, and coal development also have wildlife and environmental impacts, with one 2012 study showing that fossil fuel-generated electricity kills nearly 20 times more birds per gigawatt-hour than electricity generated by wind.

4. You have said rising sea levels would create more oceanfront property. But the changes already underway have meant flooding, erosion and damage to homes and businesses both on the coast and inland. With losses mounting and the federal flood insurance program more than $20 billion in debt to taxpayers, should the U.S. government continue to insure the properties most at risk? And if not, what do you think the federal government should do about homes and businesses that can’t get private flood insurance, especially in your home state of Florida?

Context: In his August 12 interview with Elon Musk, Trump asserted that sea level is expected to rise one inch every 400 years, but a comprehensive 2022 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that sea levels on the US coast are on track to rise 10 inches in the next 30 years. NOAA projects the incidence of flooding in the US will increase tenfold as a result.

5. When you first ran for president, you promised to bring back coal jobs. But eight coal companies went bankrupt during your presidency and the United States lost 12,700 coal jobs—a decline of 25 percent. What is your plan to help coal workers? 

Context: The coal industry has been weakening steadily over more than a decade due to what most economists see as a sectoral decline in the industry due to competition from cheaper natural gas and renewable energy. Eight US coal companies went bankrupt between October 2018 and October 2019. Under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act—the main vehicle for President Joe Biden’s climate policy—coal states like Wyoming and West Virginia have been given a competitive advantage in attracting clean energy development projects and associated federal funding in order to address displaced workers.

Questions for Harris

1. As California attorney general, you took legal action against oil companies over oil spills and other pollution, and as a presidential candidate in 2019, you talked about the federal and state litigation against tobacco companies as a model of how to address fossil fuel companies’ role in the climate crisis. Do you believe the Justice Department should join with states taking action against oil companies over climate damages?

Context: In 1998, 52 state and territorial attorneys general signed a massive $200 billion agreement with the nation’s four largest tobacco companies to settle dozens of lawsuits they brought to recover their smoking-related health care costs. The next year, the Justice Department also filed suit against Big Tobacco and after years of legal wrangling and a nine-month trial, a federal judge in 2006 ruled that the manufacturers had violated the federal organized crime law, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. That litigation is ongoing 25 years later, as the industry continues to challenge remedies imposed by the court, which are designed to prohibit it from making false or deceptive claims about tobacco products. 

2. Despite the progress made on clean energy during the Biden administration, the US isn’t on track to hit the Paris climate agreement targets for greenhouse gas reductions. This not only endangers lives and property, it undermines US credibility in persuading other nations, especially China, to reduce their climate pollution. What would you do to change that? 

Context: The Climate Action Tracker, a nonprofit international research organization, projects that US greenhouse gas emissions are on track to be about one-third below 2005 levels by 2030, falling short of the Biden administration’s pledge to cut them in half. Another research organization, the Rhodium Group, reached a similar conclusion, calculating that to meet its Paris target, the United States would have to achieve a 6.9 percent emissions reduction every year from 2024 through 2030, more than triple the 1.9 percent drop seen in 2023. 

3. In 2019, you said that we “have to acknowledge the residual impact of fracking is enormous in terms of the health and safety of communities.” As president, what would you do to protect the health and safety of communities who are exposed to air pollution and water contamination caused by the fracking process?

Context: Almost 2,500 scientific papers have documented negative health impacts from fracking, according to the Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York. They include a 2022 Yale study showing Pennsylvania children who grew up within a mile of a natural gas well were twice as likely as other children to develop the most common form of juvenile leukemia, and a 2023 University of Pittsburgh study showing they were seven times as likely to suffer from lymphoma. The oil and gas industry has maintained high-pressure water fracturing for oil and gas production from underground shale formations is safe, but the industry has had to pay to provide new water supply for residents with contaminated wells. The issue is especially divisive in Pennsylvania, which became the nation’s second-largest natural gas producing state (after Texas) due to fracking, and is a key state in the presidential race.

4. Did you support President Biden’s move to pause further permitting of liquefied natural gas export facilities while the government assesses the potential climate impact? Now that a federal judge has ordered the administration to resume permitting, would you go forward with new LNG projects or seek to overturn the judge’s order?

Conext: Biden’s LNG permitting pause in January put into question the future of at least 17 terminals currently being considered along US coastlines to export natural gas overseas. The move was challenged by a coalition of Republican-led states and in July, a Trump-appointed federal judge ordered the administration to resume permitting LNG terminals. Although the Biden administration is appealing that order, on September 3, it approved a short-term expansion of one existing terminal’s permit to export from the Gulf of Mexico. 

5. Farm work is among the nation’s most dangerous occupations and has become even deadlier due to more intense and frequent heat waves driven by climate change. Nearly half of farmworkers nationwide are undocumented and face even greater risks because they’re afraid to complain about unsafe working conditions. Will you give these workers some form of legal status and implement a federal heat standard that ensures the health and safety of those exposed to dangerous heat conditions at work?

Context: Rising temperatures have prompted questions about whether employers should be required to provide shade, rest periods, and cool water to workers who face health risks because of extreme heat, particularly those who must work outdoors, like farmworkers and construction workers. After the heat-related death of a 38-year-old farmworker in Oregon during the historic 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, that state put new heat-protection rules in place. But Florida’s legislature and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis approved legislation early this year banning localities from establishing such rules. The Biden administration proposed the first federal worker heat protection standards in July, three years after the president first promised them. It will be up to the next president to decide whether to finalize that plan or abandon it in the face of certain legal challenges from business groups and their political allies.