A Democracy Drive Thread
It began with a deal: give me $1 billion, Trump told oil executives, and I'll erase Biden's climate rules. This is the payback — “drill, baby, drill,” gutted pollution limits, dying coal plants forced to run, wind and solar killed off, and the climate science itself censored.
In April 2024, Trump gathered about twenty oil executives at Mar-a-Lago and asked them to raise $1 billion for his campaign, framing it as “a deal” — a bargain against the taxes and regulations they would avoid if he reversed Biden's climate policies. He won, and he delivered. This thread tracks the payback in chronological order, with sources: the “energy dominance” blitz and the retreat from the Paris accord; a fracking CEO installed to run the Energy Department; the EPA dismantling the rules — and the science — behind climate regulation; billions in clean-energy grants and tax credits clawed back; offshore wind halted and dying coal plants forced to keep burning at ratepayers' expense; and the government's own climate researchers dismissed and their data scrubbed. The through-line is simple: a fossil-fuel industry that paid, and a president paying it back.
May 9, 2024
In April 2024, Trump hosted roughly 20 oil executives — from Chevron, ExxonMobil, Continental, Chesapeake, and Occidental — at Mar-a-Lago and told them they should raise $1 billion to return him to the White House, vowing to immediately reverse Biden's environmental rules: unfreezing LNG export permits, auctioning more Gulf drilling leases, and rolling back auto-emissions standards. Trump called the $1 billion “a deal,” given the taxes and regulation they'd avoid. House Oversight Democrats opened a probe into whether it was a quid pro quo.
January 20, 2025
On January 20, 2025, Trump declared the first-ever “national energy emergency” and signed “Unleashing American Energy,” directing agencies to fast-track fossil-fuel drilling, open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and stand up a National Energy Dominance Council. The orders defined “energy” to include oil, gas, coal, and uranium — but pointedly not wind, solar, or batteries. There was no shortage: the U.S. was already producing more oil and gas than any nation in history.
“We will drill, baby, drill.”
On the ground
On January 20, 2025, hours into his second term, Trump signed Executive Order 14162, “Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements,” directing the United States to withdraw from the Paris climate accord — the near-universal treaty to limit global warming — for the second time, having first pulled out in his initial term before President Biden rejoined. The same day he declared a “national energy emergency,” moved to expand fossil-fuel production, and paused new federal wind-power leasing.
January 27, 2025
On the ground
In a note dated January 27, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio informed the United Nations that the United States was rescinding all of its outstanding pledges — about $4 billion — to the Green Climate Fund, the largest international fund helping more than 100 developing countries adapt to a warming world and cut emissions. The move, announced in early February, followed Trump’s first-day executive order revoking U.S. climate-finance commitments. The U.S. had pledged $6 billion under Presidents Obama and Biden but delivered only $2 billion.
February 3, 2025
On February 3, 2025, the Senate confirmed Chris Wright — CEO of Liberty Energy, North America's second-largest fracking company, who has denied there is a climate crisis — as Secretary of Energy. He joined a fossil-fuel-friendly leadership: former oil-state governor Doug Burgum at Interior (chairing the National Energy Dominance Council) and Lee Zeldin at the EPA, who would lead the dismantling of climate rules. The industry that had been asked for $1 billion now had its allies running the agencies that regulate it.
February 14, 2025
On February 14, 2025, Trump signed an executive order establishing the National Energy Dominance Council inside the White House to push expanded production of oil, gas, coal, and other fuels by cutting “red tape” across permitting, drilling, and transportation. He put Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in charge, with Energy Secretary Chris Wright — former CEO of the fracking firm Liberty Energy — as vice chair, planting fossil-fuel industry priorities at the center of federal energy policy.
March 10, 2025
At CERAWeek, the oil and gas industry’s premier conference, on March 10, 2025, Energy Secretary Chris Wright — former CEO of the hydraulic-fracturing company Liberty Energy — told executives the world economy depends on expanding hydrocarbons and cast solar and wind as costly failures. In his first year he moved to cut more than $11 billion in energy grants, including $7.6 billion for clean-energy projects.
March 11, 2025
On the ground
On March 11, 2025, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin moved to terminate roughly $20 billion in grants from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund — the Inflation Reduction Act’s “green bank,” meant to finance clean-energy and emissions-cutting projects — sending immediate termination notices to eight nonprofit recipients and freezing funds already parked at an outside bank. Awardees sued and courts scrutinized the legality of the clawback; Congress later repealed the fund’s remaining money in the July 2025 tax law.
March 12, 2025
On the ground
On March 12, 2025, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin unveiled 31 simultaneous deregulatory actions targeting rules on air, water, and climate pollution from power plants, oil and gas operations, vehicles, and factories — and moved to reconsider the 2009 “endangerment finding,” the scientific determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health that underpins virtually all federal climate regulation. Zeldin called it “the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history.” The agency also announced it was closing its environmental-justice offices.
March 14, 2025
On the ground
On March 14, 2025, Trump signed a Congressional Review Act resolution nullifying the EPA rule that would have implemented the Inflation Reduction Act’s “Waste Emissions Charge” — the first-ever federal fee on a greenhouse gas, levied on oil and gas operators for excess methane, a pollutant far more potent than carbon dioxide. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that scrapping the fee would cost taxpayers about $7.2 billion in lost revenue over a decade.
March 18, 2025
In March 2025, after EPA chief Zeldin publicly vowed to recover the $20 billion in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants, the FBI and DOJ opened a criminal investigation into the climate and community nonprofits that had received them — including Habitat for Humanity — alleging a “conspiracy to defraud the United States,” and Citibank was directed to freeze the groups' accounts. A D.C. magistrate judge rejected a seizure warrant for lack of probable cause, and the 24-year veteran head of the U.S. Attorney's Criminal Division resigned rather than convene a grand jury to freeze the funds without evidence.
April 3, 2025
As a candidate, Trump told oil and gas executives at Mar-a-Lago he wanted them to raise $1 billion for his campaign, pitching expanded drilling and the repeal of environmental and EV rules in return; the industry ultimately funneled hundreds of millions to his effort. In office his administration delivered — opening hundreds of millions of acres to oil and gas, rolling back pollution rules, and terminating clean-energy and EV programs — a payoff watchdogs valued in the billions for his fossil-fuel backers.
April 4, 2025
On the ground
Two weeks after an executive order demanding a rapid increase in mineral production on public land, the Agriculture Department lifted protections on roughly 264,000 acres in the Ruby Mountains of Nevada — closed to oil, gas and geothermal development — and on the Upper Pecos watershed in north-central New Mexico, where mineral mining had been barred. Both protections were granted under the Biden administration at the request of Native American tribes and local communities, and were meant to run 20 years. The Pecos headwaters feed a river that supplies drinking and irrigation water across northern New Mexico; the area still carries contamination from a mine abandoned decades ago. State lawmakers, tribal leaders and local governments opposed the reversal.
April 8, 2025
On the ground
On April 8, 2025, Trump signed a package of executive orders aimed at reviving the declining coal industry: directing agencies to treat coal as a critical mineral, open public lands to coal mining, and keep aging coal plants running to meet electricity demand from data centers and AI. A companion action exempted at least 66 coal-fired power plants — including the single dirtiest plant in the country — from a 2024 rule tightening limits on mercury and other hazardous air pollutants, pushing their compliance deadline to 2029. Trump routinely praises “beautiful, clean coal,” though coal is the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel.
April 11, 2025
In April 2025, the administration moved to narrow the Endangered Species Act's definition of “harm,” so that destroying a species' habitat through oil drilling, mining, or logging would no longer count as harming it, as long as animals were not directly killed. On April 11 it also restored a 2017 reading of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act that legalizes the incidental killing of birds by oil pits, power lines, and other industry. Conservationists warned the changes could push vulnerable species toward extinction.
April 16, 2025
On the ground
On April 16, 2025, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered a stop to construction on Empire Wind 1, an 810-megawatt offshore wind farm off New York that was already fully federally permitted and under construction, claiming the prior administration had “rushed” its approval. The halt followed Trump’s Day One executive order withdrawing all federal waters from offshore-wind leasing and pausing permits for wind projects nationwide. Work resumed weeks later after negotiations with New York, but the administration halted the project again in December 2025.
April 24, 2025
On the ground
The order, “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources,” directs Commerce to fast-track exploration and commercial recovery permits for seabed minerals — manganese, nickel, cobalt, rare earths — both inside the U.S. exclusive economic zone and beyond it. To reach international waters it invokes the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act of 1980, a stopgap passed two years before the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea created the international body that governs the seabed. Legal scholars note the U.S. is asserting permitting power over waters it has no recognized jurisdiction over. The deep sea floor is among the least-studied habitats on Earth; the mining would strip it before the baseline science exists to say what is being lost.
April 28, 2025
On the ground
On April 28, 2025, the administration released all of the roughly 400 volunteer scientists and experts working on the next National Climate Assessment — the flagship, congressionally mandated report on how climate change is affecting the country — telling them its scope was being “reevaluated.” By June 30 the existing assessments had been removed from federal websites with no explanation or replacement. White House budget director Russ Vought pushed to scrap the work begun under Biden and install researchers reflecting the administration’s claim that climate change is not a serious threat. The administration also dissolved the federal advisory committee that oversees the assessment, leaving the congressionally mandated report with neither authors nor oversight.
When a sweeping power outage struck Spain and Portugal on April 28, 2025, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright went on CNBC to pin it on renewables: “When you hitch your wagon to the weather, it's just a risky endeavor.” Spain's prime minister and grid operator, the EU's energy chief, and a later expert panel of European grid operators all said renewables were not the cause — the outage was traced to a voltage surge. The swipe fit a broader campaign to blame clean energy for grid problems it did not create.
“When you hitch your wagon to the weather, it's just a risky endeavor.”
May 23, 2025
Consumers Energy had planned to close the aging J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan at the end of May 2025, with replacement power secured. Just days before, the Department of Energy invoked emergency powers to force it to keep running, then extended the order again and again — pushing the shutdown back some 270 days and counting. Keeping the plant open ran a net loss of more than $135 million through 2025 — over $600,000 a day — with about $42 million billed to families and businesses across 11 states.
June 12, 2025
In mid-June 2025, Trump signed congressional resolutions revoking the EPA waiver that let California set stricter vehicle-emissions rules than the federal government, nullifying the state's plan to require rising shares of zero-emission vehicles and to end new gas-only car sales by 2035. Because 17 states — about 30% of the U.S. auto market — had adopted California's standards, the move struck down clean-car policy across much of the country.
June 23, 2025
Across 2025 the administration moved to open federal lands to extraction: the Bureau of Land Management rescinded the Public Lands Rule that had put conservation on par with drilling and grazing, and the Agriculture Department repealed the Roadless Rule protecting nearly 40 million acres of national forest — stripping protections from more than 86 million acres in all. In July 2026, Trump shrank Utah's Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments by about 90% — roughly 2.9 million acres — opening them to mining and drilling in the largest rollback of public-land protection in U.S. history.
July 4, 2025
Signed on July 4, 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act sharply rolled back the clean-energy tax credits created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act: wind and solar projects must now begin construction by mid-2026 or enter service by the end of 2027 to qualify, and new foreign-sourcing rules narrow eligibility further. It also killed the up-to-$7,500 tax credit for buying an electric vehicle. Analysts projected tens of gigawatts of canceled solar and wind and billions in lost clean-energy investment.
August 1, 2025
By mid-2025, independent analyses (Carbon Brief, Princeton's REPEAT project, Rhodium) projected that Trump's dismantling of climate policy — the OBBB repeals, the EPA rollbacks, the killed wind and solar — would add on the order of 7 billion tonnes of additional CO2 by 2050 versus the prior U.S. path, cutting emissions only about 25% by 2035 instead of the pledged ~32%, and slashing planned solar and wind capacity by scores of gigawatts.
August 8, 2025
On the ground
The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement approved the West Antelope II South Tract mining plan modification, releasing 14.5 million tons of publicly owned coal in Converse County, Wyoming. The agency issued a Finding of No Significant Impact — the determination that lets a project proceed without a full environmental impact statement — for burning coal whose emissions are the single largest source of U.S. power-sector carbon. The mine, operated by Navajo Transitional Energy Company, employs 359 people across two counties and will now run through 2037. Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon welcomed the decision.
September 29, 2025
On the ground
The Bureau of Land Management made up to 13.1 million acres available for new federal coal leases — 6.7 million in Montana, 3.8 million in North Dakota, 2.2 million in Wyoming, 1.6 million in Colorado, 200,000 in New Mexico and 48,000 in Utah — more than three times the acreage the “One Big Beautiful Bill” actually mandated. It simultaneously cut the federal coal royalty rate from 12.5% to 7%, reducing what the public is paid for coal taken from public land, and lifted the Biden-era moratorium on new leasing in the Powder River Basin. Leases were also opened near Zion and Bryce Canyon in Utah. The economics did not follow the policy: subsequent federal coal auctions drew few or no bidders, the industry having moved on regardless of what Washington made available.
October 6, 2025
On the ground
The Ambler Road would cut 211 miles through the Brooks Range to reach a copper and mineral district in northwest Alaska, crossing Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve — the second-largest unit in the national park system, and roadless wilderness that caribou herds and the communities depending on them move through. The Biden administration had denied the right-of-way permit; in October 2025 Trump signed an order reversing that denial. At least 40 federally recognized tribes and dozens of Alaska Native corporations publicly opposed it. The principal developer is Trilogy Metals, a Canadian company in which the administration had taken a $36.5 million equity stake — the federal government approving a road it stood to profit from. Ten conservation groups and 40 tribes filed suit.
October 23, 2025
On the ground
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum finalized a plan replacing the Biden administration’s restricted leasing program with the maximum-development version: the whole coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 1.56 million acres, offered for oil and gas. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed that summer mandates at least four lease sales in the refuge over ten years. The coastal plain is the calving ground of the Porcupine caribou herd; Gwich’in communities who depend on that herd regard the land as sacred and have fought leasing for decades. Leaders of Kaktovik, the Iñupiaq village inside the refuge, support development. Previous ANWR lease auctions under the first Trump term drew almost no bidders, and the major banks had by then largely refused to finance Arctic drilling.
March 9, 2026
In his energy-emergency push, Trump promised to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, drained during the Biden years, “right to the top.” More than a year later the reserve sat around 56-58% full — roughly 400 of a possible 714 million barrels — and by mid-2026 was posting record weekly drawdowns rather than refills. The gap between the “energy dominance” rhetoric and the half-empty reserve underscored how much of the agenda was posture for the oil industry rather than genuine energy security.
“We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again right to the top, and export American energy all over the world.”