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Politics

What the Oil and Gas Industry Expects from Trump

On rumors from fossil fuel insiders, the LA wind forecast, and Davos

Jessica Hullinger •
01/15/2025
What the Oil and Gas Industry Expects from Trump
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms brought transportation chaos to Sydney and left 120,000 homes without power • Greece may resort to filling hotel pools with seawater instead of fresh water due to extreme drought • A clipper storm will bring some snow to the Great Lakes and parts of Appalachia today and tomorrow.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Strong winds continue to fan LA fires

Winds in fire-ravaged Los Angeles were weaker than expected yesterday, but are forecast to pick up again today as firefighters continue to battle ongoing blazes. The National Weather Service issued another “particularly dangerous situation” warning indicating extreme red flag fire weather in large parts of LA until 3 p.m. Wednesday. The Palisades fire is just 18% contained, and the Eaton fire is 35% contained. Some 88,000 people are under evacuation orders, and the death toll has reached 25. Conditions are expected to ease tomorrow, but another round of Santa Ana winds could emerge next week, the NWS said.

National Weather Service

2. Trump planning executive orders on energy

Lobbyists for the oil and gas industry widely believe President-elect Donald Trump will issue a suite of executive orders targeting energy policy shortly after his inauguration. According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump is expected to “instruct agencies to begin unwinding President Biden’s limits on drilling offshore and on federal land.” Other moves to watch for include:

  • Rolling back tailpipe emissions rules
  • Resuming approvals for natural gas export facilities
  • Transforming agencies including the EPA, and the departments of energy and the interior
  • Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement
  • Creating a new national energy council
  • Declaring a national energy emergency in order to fast-track permits for new energy projects
  • And of course, a ban on offshore wind turbine activity, which Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported yesterday

Trump’s team has apparently discussed his plans with energy industry insiders, but these are not set in stone. “Energy clearly was on the ballot, and we’re going to make the case that energy won,” Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute, told the Journal.

3. Trump DOE nominee Chris Wright to face Senate confirmation hearing

President-elect Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Energy, Chris Wright, is scheduled for his Senate confirmation hearing today at 10 a.m. EST. He will face questions from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Democrats had asked the panel’s chairman, Republican Sen. Mike Lee, to postpone the hearing due to missing paperwork from the Office of Government Ethics that includes financial disclosures. Lee postponed the hearing for Trump’s pick for interior secretary, Doug Burgum, for a similar reason. Wright is currently the CEO for fracking powerhouse Liberty Energy. The Sierra Club called him a “climate denier who has profited off of polluting our communities and endangering our health and future.”

4. Extreme weather ranks 2nd on list of global risks for 2025

The World Economic Forum put out its annual report of global risks ahead of next week’s summit in Davos. Extreme weather events, which were at the top of the list last year, moved down a notch into the second position, below armed conflict. Twenty-three percent of the 900 or so expert respondents ranked state-based armed conflict as the number one risk facing the globe in 2025, whereas 14% chose extreme weather events:

WEF

Last year, 66% of respondents ranked extreme weather as the top risk, and 53% chose AI-generated misinformation. Looking ahead over the next 10 years, the climate crisis looms very large: Experts ranked extreme weather events, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, critical change to Earth systems, and natural resource shortages as the top risks facing the globe through 2035. The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting runs from January 20 - 25. President-elect Trump is expected to give a virtual address on the 23rd.

5. Nobel laureates call for ‘moonshot’ solutions to global hunger

A group of more than 150 Nobel laureates composed an open letter calling on governments to support the development of “moonshot” innovations to avert a looming hunger crisis. The letter warns some 700 million people are already going hungry, and the problem will only worsen as the population grows. The global food shortage has many causes, but the letter cites climate change as a major challenge and calls for “planet-friendly” technologies to boost food production. “We know that agricultural research and innovation can be a powerful lever, not only for food and nutrition security, but also improved health, livelihoods, and economic development,” said Cary Fowler, joint 2024 World Food Prize Laureate and outgoing U.S. Special Envoy for Global Food Security. “We need to channel our best scientific efforts into reversing our current trajectory, or today’s crisis will become tomorrow’s catastrophe.”

THE KICKER

Global EV sales were up by 25% last year compared to 2023, according to research group Rho Motion. In the U.S. and Canada, sales rose by 9%, compared to a 40% jump in China.

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Jessica Hullinger profile image

Jessica Hullinger

Jessica Hullinger is a freelance writer and editor who likes to think deeply about climate science and sustainability. She previously served as Global Deputy Editor for The Week, and her writing has been featured in publications including Fast Company, Popular Science, and Fortune. Jessica is originally from Indiana but lives in London.

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Hotspots

Local Permitting Fights Take Over National Politics

And more on this week’s conflicts around project development.

Jael Holzman
08/21/2026
The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Montgomery County, Pennsylvania – We reached a new normal in the data center backlash, and it all seems to have started in King of Prussia.

  • On Tuesday, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro announced his state – one once coveted by the AI industry for hyperscale construction – will no longer permit projects without local support. It was a step change from posture taken mere months earlier, when he announced voluntary standards for data center development that I found may have been vetted by representatives of the industry, including Amazon.
  • Tucked in Shapiro’s speech was what I can only imagine was his last straw: developer Brian O’Neill’s efforts to construct data center buildings in the King of Prussia community, close to where he grew up himself. Without calling him out by name, the governor said he was “stoking fear in the community, even though he has no realistic path to getting power at the sites any time soon.”
  • “Here’s something else he has no realistic path to getting: my support,” the governor said.
  • As the climate news outlet DeSmog wrote earlier this month, O’Neill had closely collaborated with members of Shapiro’s administration for more than a year before this speech happened, including on securing energy. But the real estate magnate’s projects kept facing local rejections; people really don’t seem to want what he’s been selling.
  • Now Shapiro is turning on O’Neill, transforming him into what he described as a type of “speculative” developer his government wishes to discourage from building projects in his state.

2. Columbia County, Wisconsin – The gubernatorial race in this state is transforming local fights over wind projects into must-watch popcorn fodder for anyone obsessed with the state of the energy transition, or national politics for that matter.

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Q&A

A CNN Reporter Joins the Fray

A conversation with Ella Nilsen — formerly of CNN, now with Echo Communications — about where we stand in the fight over the energy transition.

Jael Holzman
08/21/2026
The Q&A subject.
Heatmap Illustration

This week’s conversation is with Ella Nilsen, who recently left CNN as a climate reporter and is now a new vice president at energy and cleantech PR firm Echo Communications. Having worked on Capitol Hill alongside Nilsen, I knew her to be an exceptional reporter who asked hard questions of those in power on all sides. So when I found out she was taking her journalism hat off and putting the comms cap on, I wanted to do something you rarely get to do with one of your reporting peers: ask for her own opinion about where we stand in the fight over the energy transition.

Our chat was lightly edited for clarity.

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AM Briefing

Ohio Isn’t for Data Center Lovers

On mineral funding, Harold Hamm’s Argentina bet, and South Korea’s offshore wind

Alexander C. Kaufman
08/21/2026
Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Heavy rainstorms are sweeping across the Great Lakes and the East Coast’s Amtrak Corridor, with the highest flood risk in North Carolina and New Jersey • Monsoonal downpours are drenching western Cameroon, with the West Region capital of Bafoussam facing more than a week of thunderstorms • A tropical storm on track to be named Moke as it strengthens will swipe Hawaii’s Big Island on Sunday afternoon as the archipelago state is still recovering from its rare encounter with Hurricane Lala last week.


THE TOP FIVE

1. Republicans fear data centers will cost the party Ohio

The “data center brand is the anchor” dragging down Republicans fighting to keep former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown from winning back his old seat. That’s the takeaway from a National Republican Senatorial Campaign memo obtained by Axios. “Data centers are the centerpiece in the case Sherrod Brown is litigating; he has made them his de facto opponent, and no one is correcting the record,” the memo reads. Still, the strategists expressed hope: “While the perceptions of data centers are weak, the American people are with us. By overwhelming margins, the American people prefer a Republican candidate who wants to only let data centers be built in communities that approve them by a local vote of the people, and that pay for their own power, water, and other utilities versus a Democrat candidate who wants to stop data center construction altogether, which will cause America to lose the AI race to China.”

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