Climate denial a unifying theme of Trump’s cabinet picks, experts say

Loyalists selected for important roles have offered staunch support to fossil fuels and downplayed climate crisis

Donald Trump’s cabinet picks have been eclectic and often controversial but a unifying theme is emerging, experts say, with the US president-elect’s nominees offering staunch support to fossil fuels and either downplaying or denying the climate crisis caused by the burning of these fuels.

Trump ran on promises to eviscerate “green new scam” climate policies and to “drill, baby, drill” for more oil and gas, and his choices to run the major organs of the US government echo such sentiments, particularly his picks relating to the environment, with Lee Zeldin chosen as the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Chris Wright as energy secretary and Doug Burgum as interior secretary.

“With these choices it looks like Project 2025 is back with full force, and it will be the blueprint for the Trump administration 2.0,” said Daniel Esty, an environmental policy expert at Yale University, in reference to the rightwing manifesto that calls for the deletion of environmental and climate protections.

“Some people didn’t think Trump would actually try to execute this but it looks like he really is going to pull back on climate change commitments, against the tide of history.”

A standout nomination is that of Wright, chief executive of the Colorado-based gas drilling company Liberty Energy, who has no government experience but was a major donor to Trump’s campaign and has frequently appeared on Fox News, and various podcasts, to extol the use of fossil fuels.

“There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either,” Wright said in a video posted online last year. He has denied that extreme weather is worsened by rising global temperatures and said that any impacts are “clearly overwhelmed by the benefits of increasing energy consumption”. Wright has opined that “carbon pollution” and even “clean energy” are “nonsense terms” that have been “made up by alarmists”.

Trump has said in a statement that his team will slash “totally unnecessary regulation” and “drive US Energy Dominance, which will drive down Inflation, win the AI arms race with China (and others), and expand American Diplomatic Power to end Wars all across the World”. The statement did not mention the climate crisis or the need to move away from fossil fuels.

Scientists are clear that the human and economic costs of the climate crisis are real, and far outstrip the action required to shift to clean energy. This energy transformation is already under way, with investment in renewables outpacing fossil fuels globally for the first time last year, with solar being installed at three times the capacity rate of gas in the US in 2023.

“He’s the most worrisome of these folks,” Esty said of Wright. “He’s the closest thing there is to a climate denier, which sets him apart from policymakers across the world.” Sean Casten, a Democratic member of Congress, was more pointed: “Chris Wright is a science-denying, self-serving, sanctimonious fracker who consistently puts the wants of energy producers over the needs of American energy consumers.”

Wright’s views will be at home within the Trump administration, however, with several other cabinet picks expressing doubts over established climate science and actions to cut planet-heating emissions. Zeldin, the putative EPA head, said in 2014 he was “not sold yet on the whole argument that we have as serious a problem as other people are” with global heating, adding in 2018 he did not support the Paris climate agreement, which Trump is again expected to withdraw the US from.

Marco Rubio, nominee for secretary of state at a time when the international community is struggling to avert disastrous global heating, previously said he did not accept the climate is changing and while he has modified this view more recently he has criticized policies to lower emissions and “the left’s climate change alarmism”.

Meanwhile, Pete Hesgeth, lined up to be head of the Department of Defense, itself one of the largest polluting entities in the world, has said climate change has become a “religion”. He said in 2019 “it’s all about control for them”, while appearing on Fox News. “That’s why climate change is the perfect enemy. They get to control your life to deal with it no matter what’s happening.”

Another Fox personality, the former Republican congressman Sean Duffy, is primed to be secretary of transportation, despite having no prior experience in an arena that produces more emissions than any other in the US.

Duffy, who in the 1990s appeared in MTV reality shows including The Real World: Boston, pondered this month on Fox: “If you say the climate’s changing, is it coming from CO2 or is it coming from the sun? Why is the climate changing?” The world is heating up because of combusted fossil fuels and deforestation, not the sun.

Even Robert F Kennedy Jr, once a hero to the environmental movement and an advocate for climate action, has shifted his views, attacking “this fixation upon carbon” and endorsing Trump, who has called the climate crisis “a big hoax”. Kennedy, a fierce opponent of vaccines and wind farms, has been nominated to be health secretary.

Burgum, the potential interior secretary, is a moderate compared to these other picks, having accepted that the climate crisis is real and even, as governor of North Dakota, setting a target for the state to be carbon neutral, albeit via unproven carbon-capture technology rather than emissions cuts. He is set to be Trump’s overall energy czar, tasked with driving up fossil fuel production, as well as managing a fifth of the US landmass in his interior role.

“North Dakota governor Doug Burgum is a proven leader and values an all-of-the-above energy approach,” said Heather Reams, president of the center-right Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions group. “Republicans recognize current federal processes are too bureaucratic and oftentimes prevent new energy projects from ever breaking ground.”

Reams added that speeded up permitting under Burgum promises “the opportunity to lessen our reliance on adversarial supply chains, reinvigorate our manufacturing sector, encourage investments and reduce global emissions”.

But Burgum is still a vocal supporter of oil and gas drilling, with his family leasing 200 acres of farmland in North Dakota to energy company Continental Resources, run by another major Trump backer in Harold Hamm. Burgum, along with Hamm, helped set up a Mar-a-Lago dinner between Trump and oil executives in which the president-elect asked for $1bn in campaign donations while vowing to gut environmental regulations if elected.

“I think under his own agenda Burgum would do a fine job, but I think he’s been brought in because of his allegiance to the Project 2025 blueprint,” said Esty.

“Overall, I think we will see a significant pullback in the breathability of air and drinkability of water, in the protections Americans have come to expect. I don’t think Trump will dramatically shift US energy production because we are already producing a lot of oil and gas but he certainly won’t be phasing them out. It’s an administration that will cause damage.”

Cover photo: By The Guardian