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.”
January 21, 2025
On January 21, 2025, Trump ordered the United States out of the Paris Agreement for a second time. Days later the administration told the U.N. it was withdrawing from the Green Climate Fund — the largest fund helping developing nations adapt to climate change — canceling about $4 billion the U.S. had pledged (of which only $2 billion had been delivered). The moves aligned the U.S., the largest historical emitter, against the global effort it had once led.
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.
February 17, 2025
In February 2025, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced a drive to “instantly terminate” roughly $20 billion in clean-energy grants that Congress had legally obligated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, casting the money as waste. “The Biden EPA tossed $20 billion of gold bars off the Titanic,” he wrote, vowing to recover it. Grant recipients — “green bank” nonprofits left unable to pay their bills — sued, and a judge ruled in April that the EPA could not simply freeze the awarded contracts.
“The Biden EPA tossed $20 billion of gold bars off the Titanic.”
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 12, 2025
On March 12, 2025, Zeldin announced 31 deregulatory actions at once, including proposals to repeal the greenhouse-gas limits on fossil-fuel power plants, to gut the mercury and air-toxics standards that had pushed coal plants to close, and to scrap the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. “Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” he said. The rollbacks lifted the pollution limits that had been driving the shift away from coal.
“Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen.”
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 8, 2025
On April 8, 2025, Trump signed executive orders to revive coal: directing agencies to classify coal as a “mineral” and evaluate it as a “critical material,” ending the moratorium on coal leasing on federal lands, prioritizing new coal leases, and rescinding policies that moved the country away from coal. The administration cast coal as needed to power AI data centers, and used emergency orders to prevent the closure of aging coal plants that utilities had planned to retire.
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
After a day-one order pausing new offshore-wind approvals, the Interior Department in April 2025 issued a stop-work order halting Empire Wind, a 2-gigawatt project off New York that was already permitted and under construction (the order was lifted weeks later after a deal with New York). Trump declared “we're not going to approve windmills,” and repeatedly disparaged wind power with false claims that turbines cause cancer and drive whales “loco.” In December the administration paused five East Coast wind farms at once, citing vague “national security” concerns.
April 28, 2025
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.”
April 29, 2025
In April 2025, the administration dismissed the roughly 400 volunteer scientists writing the Sixth National Climate Assessment — the congressionally mandated report on how climate change is hitting the United States — fired the staff of the U.S. Global Change Research Program that produces it, and later took down the program's website along with a quarter-century of past assessments. It followed a pattern: barring federal scientists from a global climate report, firing climate and weather specialists, and even banning agencies from using phrases like “clean energy” and “methane emissions.”
May 14, 2025
In May 2025, EPA Administrator Zeldin announced the agency would give water utilities two more years — until 2031 — to meet limits on the “forever chemicals” PFOA and PFOS, and would rescind entirely the 2024 drinking-water limits on four other PFAS compounds (GenX, PFHxS, PFNA, PFBS). More than 73 million Americans are served by water systems that have detected PFAS above those limits, which are linked to cancer, immune harm, and developmental problems.
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.
July 29, 2025
On July 29, 2025, the EPA proposed to repeal the 2009 endangerment finding — the scientific determination that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, which is the legal foundation for every federal climate rule — along with all greenhouse-gas standards for vehicles. Officials framed the move as ending the “climate change religion.” Scientists and environmental groups sued, noting the Energy Department report used to justify it contradicted the overwhelming scientific consensus.
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.
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.”