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These are the top contenders for the most climate-influential jobs.
If Donald Trump moves back to Washington, D.C., in January 2025, he won’t arrive alone. Though Trump’s first term was marked by a messy transition and bouts of political incompetence, Republican operatives have spent the past four years putting together a plan to hit the ground running if or when he returns — as well as a list of friendly names for plum positions in the would-be Trump administration. Many additional Republicans have quietly (and, often, not so quietly) spent the past few years auditioning for these top roles, typically by signaling their willingness to continue dismantling the regulatory and administrative states.
While nearly all positions in a Trump cabinet have at least some ability to limit or eliminate climate progress, here are some names circulating for the most influential departments.
The past is prologue when it comes to a future Trump administration, making Dan Brouillette an easy guess to head of the Department of Energy: His reappointment would mark a return to the post he left during the presidential transition in 2021.
But Secretary of Energy is nothing if not a competitive position, and Brouillette isn’t treating it like he’s a shoo-in, either. Since 2023, he’s served as the president and CEO of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade association for electric utilities that has taken a more tepid stance on climate policies during his tenure. He’s also spent plenty of time going on TV and speaking to the press against Biden’s (since overturned) pause in approving new export facilities for liquified natural gas — an industry he has history with but that falls well outside his purview EEI. The effect is more a performance for Trump than it is any sort of service for his organization’s members. Brouillette has also repeatedly insisted that the Trump administration won’t gut the Inflation Reduction Act, an oddly blasé attitude about legislation that has significantly benefited the utilities EEI represents.
Bernard McNamee, the author of the Department of Energy section of Project 2025, is another top choice for the DOE. One of the “most overtly political” people to ever be appointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, in the words of E&E News, McNamee has said that fossil fuels are “key to our prosperity” and that the renewable push amounts to “tyranny.” His chapter of Project 2025 calls for — among other things — closing the renewable energy offices at the DOE, eliminating energy efficiency standards for appliances, and refocusing the three National Labs run by DOE on “national security issues.”
If Trump doesn’t pick Doug Burgum for vice president, there is a strong chance there could be a home for him at the DOE instead. Many see the governor of North Dakota as a frontrunner for Energy Secretary, suspicions Burgum has reinforced by cozying up to Trump as a political surrogate, even warming up crowds at the candidate’s political rallies. While Burgum “at times [could] seem environmentally conscious” during his gubernatorial tenure, he’s recently shifted to more familiar Republican talking points on the oil and gas industry and reportedly helped connect Trump to would-be donors in the fossil fuel sectors, according to reporting by The New York Times. He has also informally advised the Trump campaign on energy policy.
There might also be a high-ranking position in the DOE for Texas oil and fracking magnate Harold Hamm, who was reportedly a finalist for the position back in 2016. Hamm, a conservative megadonor, briefly broke with Trump during the Republican primary but has since returned to fundraise for his campaign. Trump prizes loyalty, however, which is why Secretary Hamm might be more of a longshot; Hamm may return to being an informal advisor for the administration instead.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem seems pretty solidly off the VP shortlist after making national headlines for admitting in her memoir that she killed a puppy, but she may yet fill a role in the administration that is less in the public spotlight. Interior wouldn’t be so far-fetched: Noem played an active part in slashing environmental protections in her state — something that ought to endear her to Trump — and she worked closely with Trump’s Secretary of the Interior to explore returning controversial firework shows to Mount Rushmore. In South Dakota, Noem also rolled the Department of Environment and Natural Resources into the Department of Agriculture and has been actively hostile to the build-out of renewable energy, going so far as to refuse to apply for IRA grant money — an action that signals her uncompromising commitment to the party’s political message to anyone watching.
If not Noem, it’s possible David Bernhardt could return to the position he held under the first Trump administration. He’s used his time out of national politics to promote better swamp management (that’s the metaphorical swamp, not literal swamps, such as the critical beachfront-adjacent wetlands he limited protections for while in office) and to push Trump’s plan to reinstate Schedule F — which will make it easier to fire employees that aren’t deemed loyal enough to the administration — declaring that his own agency had been “overwhelmingly liberal” during his tenure. Bernhardt has adopted skepticism of career civil servants as something of a pet cause, publishing a 2023 book called You Report to Me: Accountability for the Failing Administrative State and filing an amicus brief to the Supreme Court earlier this year that argued, “One would be naïve not to understand how policy drives the ‘science’ at an agency.”
Those familiar with Bernhardt’s thinking, though, see the former secretary as angling for a more ambitious post in a future Trump administration, such as director of the Office of Management and Budget. An OMB appointment would potentially put Bernhardt on a collision course with Russ Vought, another Schedule F proponent, which means that if the former Interior secretary’s apparent angling for a new office doesn’t pan out, he may end up back in a more familiar role.
Trump’s former ambassador to Portugal, George Glass, has also been floated in the Interior conversation. An Oregon businessman, Glass fits the bill as a Westerner — since 1949, just one Interior secretary has not been a resident or native of a state west of the Mississippi. He also sees eye-to-eye with Trump as a China hawk, and while he doesn’t have much of a climate record, he has been a steady donor whose loyalty could be rewarded again with a plum administrative position.
While the Department of Agriculture doesn’t have the same levers to pull as Interior or Energy, the USDA nevertheless oversees one of the most significant sources of planet-warming emissions in the United States. While the Biden administration’s USDA has explicitly pursued an “equitable and climate-smart food and agriculture economy,” the Heritage Foundation instead wants the agency to “play a limited role” that doesn’t “hinder food production or otherwise undermine efforts to meet consumer demand.”
J. D. Vance has emerged as one candidate to get that job done. The Hillbilly Elegy author-turned-Ohio-senator previously invested in an agriculture startup and has taken a particular interest in the farm bill, while at the same time boasts a 0% lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters. Vance’s name has also been in the hat for VP, and he’s certainly done his best to remain in Trump’s good graces, which could land him a secretary post if he doesn’t ultimately make the cut as a running mate.
There might be a better case, though, that this department ends up in the hands of Sid Miller. Currently serving as the Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Miller was reportedly on the shortlist for the position back in 2016. He has blamed weather-related power outages in his state on renewable intermittency, at one time writing, “to heck with green energy or climate change.” Miller is something of a firebrand, however, alienating even some within his own party, and he could struggle to garner the bipartisan support that will likely be necessary to win confirmation.
Though Trump initially avoided answering a question about the climate during the first presidential debate, he had talking points ready thanks to Andrew Wheeler, his former head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Trump seemingly referred to Wheeler as one of “my top environmental people,” suggesting that in addition to being an informal adviser to the campaign, Wheeler and his work at the EPA remain in high regard with Trump himself. While in the previous administration, Wheeler notably helped to roll back over 100 clean air, water, and environmental regulations.
Wheeler himself has been cagey about whether he’s auditioning for another Trump position, though — this spring, he joined the Holland & Hart law firm as a partner focused on federal affairs. If Wheeler decides to stay in the private sector, Trump might turn instead to Mandy Gunasekara, one of the primary architects of the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change and the author of the especially concerning Project 2025 chapter on the EPA.
Gunasekara has bolstered the case for herself by describing how she would curtail the EPA’s powers, eliminate its enforcement office, and “update the 2009 endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and the environment — science that has been used as the backbone for the EPA’s climate change regulations for years. Gunasekara has also said that while she believes in human-caused climate change, planetary warming is “overstated” and erroneously claimed that scientific data shows “a mild and manageable climate change in the future.” That rhetoric puts her right in sync with her potential future boss.
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The Senate’s reconciliation bill essentially repeals the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, abolishing fines for automakers that sell too many gas guzzlers.
A new provision in the Senate reconciliation bill would neuter the country’s fuel efficiency standards for automakers, gutting one of the federal government’s longest-running programs to manage gasoline prices and air pollution.
The new provision — which was released on Thursday by the Senate Commerce Committee — would essentially strip the government of its ability to enforce the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, or CAFE standards.
The CAFE rules are the government’s main program to improve the fuel economy of new cars and light-duty trucks sold in the United States. Over the past 20 years, the rules have helped push the fuel efficiency of new vehicles to record highs even as consumers have adopted crossovers and SUVs en masse.
But the Republican reconciliation bill would essentially end the program as a practical concern for automakers. It would set all fines issued under the program to zero, stripping the government of its ability to punish automakers that sell too many polluting vehicles.
“It would essentially eviscerate the standard without actually doing so directly,” Ann Carlson, a UCLA law professor who led the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2022 to 2023, told me.
“It says that, ‘We have standards here, but we don’t care if you comply or not. If you don’t comply, we’re not going to hold you responsible,’” she said.
Representatives for the Senate Commerce Committee did not respond to an immediate request for comment. A talking points memo released by the committee on Thursday said that the new bill would “[bring] down automobile prices modestly by eliminating CAFE penalties on automakers that design cars to conform to the wishes of D.C. bureaucrats rather than consumers.”
Since 1975, Congress has required the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (pronounced NIT-suh) to set annual fuel efficiency standards for new cars and light trucks sold in the United States. The rules generally require new vehicles sold nationwide to get a little more fuel efficient, on average, every year.
The rules have remained in effect — with varying levels of stringency — for 50 years, although they have generally encouraged automakers to get more efficient since Congress strengthened the law on a bipartisan basis in 2007.
In model-year 2023, the most recent period for which data is available, new cars and light trucks achieved a real-world fuel economy of 27.1 miles per gallon, an all-time high. The vehicle fleet was set to hit another record high in 2024, according to last year’s report.
Opponents of the fuel economy rules argue that the regulations increase the sticker price of new cars and trucks and push automakers to build less profitable vehicles. The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that published Project 2025, has called the rules a “backdoor EV mandate.”
The rules’ supporters say that the standards are necessary because consumers don’t take fuel costs — or the environmental or public health costs of air pollution — into account when buying a vehicle. They say the rules keep gasoline prices low for all Americans by encouraging fuel efficiency across the board.
The strict Biden-era rules were projected to save consumers $23 billion in gasoline costs, according to an agency analysis. The American Lung Association said that the rules would prevent more than 2 million pediatric asthma attacks and save hundreds of infant lives by 2050.
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has targeted the fuel economy rules as part of a wide-ranging effort to roll back Biden-era energy policy. On January 28, as his first official act, Duffy ordered NHTSA to retroactively weaken the rules for all cars and light trucks sold after model-year 2022.
On Friday, Duffy separately issued a legal opinion that would restrict NHTSA’s ability to include electric vehicles in its real-world estimates of the country’s fuel economy rules. The opinion sets up the next round of CAFE rules to be considerably weaker than existing law.
But the new Republican reconciliation bill, if adopted, would render those rules moot.
Under current law, automakers must pay a fine when the average fuel economy of the vehicles they sell exceeds the fuel economy standard set for that year. Automakers can avoid paying that penalty by buying “credits” from other car companies that have done better than the rules require.
The fine’s size is set by a formula written into the law. That calculation includes the number of cars sold above the fuel-economy threshold, how much those cars exceeded it, and a $5 multiplier. The GOP tax bill rewrites the law to set the multiplier to zero dollars.
In essence, no matter how much an automaker exceeds the fuel economy rules, the GOP reconciliation bill will now multiply their fine by zero.
The original CAFE law contains a second formula allowing the government to set even higher penalties if doing so would achieve “substantial energy conservation.” The new reconciliation bill sets the multiplier in this formula, too, to zero dollars.
The CAFE law’s penalties can be significant. The automaker Stellantis, which owns Fiat and Chrysler, recently paid more than $426 million in penalties for cars sold from model year 2018 to 2020. Last year, General Motors paid a $38 million fine for light trucks sold in model year 2020.
The CAFE provision in the GOP mega-bill seems designed to skirt past the Byrd rule, a Senate rule that policies in reconciliation bills must affect revenue, spending, or generally have more than a “merely incidental” effect on the federal budget.
But Carlson, the former NHTSA acting administrator, doubted whether the provision should really survive a Byrd bath.
Zeroing out the fines is “not really about revenue,” she said, but about compliance with the law. “This is a way to try to couch repeal of CAFE in revenue terms instead of doing it outright.”
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nassau County, New York – Opponents of Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project are now suing to stop construction after the Trump administration quietly lifted its stop-work order.
2. Somerset County, Maryland – A referendum campaign in rural Maryland seeks to restrict solar development on farmland.
3. Tazewell County, Virginia – An Energix solar project is still in the works in this rural county bordering West Virginia, despite a restrictive ordinance.
4. Allan County, Indiana – This county, which includes portions of Fort Wayne, will be holding a hearing next week on changing its current solar zoning rules.
5. Madison County, Indiana – Elsewhere in Indiana, Invenergy has abandoned the Lone Oak solar project amidst fervent opposition and mounting legal hurdles.
6. Adair County, Missouri – This county may soon be home to the largest solar farm in Missouri and is in talks for another project, despite having a high opposition intensity index in the Heatmap Pro database.
7. Newtown County, Arkansas – A fifth county in Arkansas has now banned wind projects.
8. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma – A data center fight is gaining steam as activists on the ground push to block the center on grounds it would result in new renewable energy projects.
9. Bell County, Texas – Fox News is back in our newsletter, this time for platforming the campaign against solar on land suitable for agriculture.
10. Monterey County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire story continues to develop, as PG&E struggles to restart the remaining battery storage facility remaining on site.
A conversation with Biao Gong of Morningstar
This week’s conversation is with Biao Gong, an analyst with Morningstar who this week published an analysis looking at the credit risks associated with offshore wind projects. Obviously I wanted to talk to him about the situation in the U.S., whether it’s still a place investors consider open for business, and if our country’s actions impact the behavior of others.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
What led you to write this analysis?
What prompted me was our experience in assigning [private] ratings to offshore wind projects in Europe and wanted to figure out what was different [for rating] with onshore and offshore wind. It was the result of our recent work, which is private, but we’ve seen the trend – a lot of the big players in the offshore wind space are kind of trying to partner up with private equity firms to sell their interests, their operating offshore wind assets. But to raise that they’ll need credit ratings and we’ve seen those transactions. This is a growing area in Europe, because Europe has to rely on offshore wind to achieve its climate goals and secure their energy independence.
The report goes through risks in many ways, including challenging conditions for construction. Tell me about the challenges that offshore wind faces specifically as an investment risk.
The principle behind offshore wind is so different than onshore wind. You’re converting wind energy to electricity but obviously there are a bunch of areas where we believe it is riskier. That doesn’t mean you can’t fund those projects but you need additional mitigants.
This includes construction risk. It can take three to five years to complete an offshore wind project. The marine condition, the climate condition, you can’t do that [work] throughout the year and you need specialized vehicles, helicopters, crews that are so labor intensive. That’s versus onshore, which is pre-fabricated where you have a foundation and assemble it. Once you have an idea of the geotechnical conditions, the risk is just less.
There’s also the permitting process, which can be very challenging. How do you not interrupt the marine ecosystem? That’s something the regulators pay attention to. It’s definitely more than an onshore project, which means you need other mitigants for the lender to feel comfortable.
With respect to the permitting risk, how much of that is the risk of opposition from vacation towns, environmentalists, fisheries?
To be honest, we usually come in after all the critical permitting is in place, before money is given by a lender, but I also think that on the government’s side, in Europe at least, they probably have to encourage the development. And to put out an auction for an area you can build an offshore wind project, they must’ve gone through their own assessment, right? They can’t put out something that they also think may hurt an ecosystem, but that’s my speculation.
A country that did examine the impacts and offer lots of ocean floor for offshore is the U.S. What’s your take on offshore wind development in our country?
Once again, because we’re a rating agency, we don’t have much insight into early stage projects. But with that, our view is pretty gloomy. It’s like, if you haven’t started a project in the U.S., no one is going to buy it. There’s a bunch of projects already under construction, and there was the Empire Wind stop order that was lifted. I think that’s positive, but only to a degree, right? It just means this project under construction can probably go ahead. Those things will go ahead and have really strong developers with strong balance sheets. But they’re going to face additional headwinds, too, because of tariffs – that’s a different story.
We don’t see anything else going ahead.
Does the U.S. behaving this way impact the view you have for offshore wind in other countries, or is this an isolated thing?
It’s very isolated. Europe is just going full-steam ahead because the advantage here is you can build a wind farm that provides 2 or 3 gigawatts – that’s just massive. China, too. The U.S. is very different – and not just offshore. The entire renewables sector. We could revisit the U.S. four or five years from today, but [the U.S.] is going to be pretty difficult for the renewables sector.