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New Report Exposes Toyota’s Years-Long Effort to Fund Climate Deniers and Block Climate Action
With its allies entering power in the White House and Congress, Toyota is poised to help dismantle climate policy that threatens its backward-looking business model
By the end of the 2024 election cycle, Toyota Motor Corp. had donated to over four times as many climate change denying members of Congress as Ford Motor Company and nearly twice as many as General Motors, according to a new report released today by Public Citizen.
According to the report, over the last three electoral cycles, Toyota has emerged as the top auto industry financier of climate deniers, financing 207 of their congressional campaigns.
“The world’s largest automaker has quietly spent the past several years building a powerful U.S. influence operation in an effort to delay the transition to electric vehicles,” said Adam Zuckerman, senior clean vehicles campaigner with Public Citizen’s Climate Program, and author of the report. “Funding a small army of climate denying lawmakers, while lobbying aggressively against stronger emissions and fuel economy standards, is a volatile combination intended to roll back policies that protect our communities and planet.”
In the three congressional election cycles between 2020 and 2024, Toyota’s political action committee donated $808,500 to the campaigns of Congressional candidates that deny or question the existence of climate change.
Days after Donald Trump won his reelection bid, Toyota Motor North America COO Jack Hollis slammed clean air rules adopted by California and other states, effectively painting a target on the policies intended to clean up air and water. After the press conference, Hollis penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled “Trump Can Get EVs Back on Track,” calling on the new administration to dismantle the Biden-era policies that encourage automakers to reduce emissions, complaining that “unrealistic regulations favor one carbon-reducing option over, and at the expense of, all others.”
“Toyota wants to continue to make dirty, polluting vehicles and align itself with climate deniers in a futile effort to hold onto internal combustion and fossil fuels,” said Zuckerman. “But EVs are the future of the automotive industry, and if it fails to evolve, Toyota risks becoming the next Kodak or Blockbuster, corporate giants that fought innovation and paid the price for it. It is a risky strategy that has left Toyota vulnerable to an influx of competitors who have leapfrogged the auto giant to build the next generation of vehicles.”
Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people - not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country.
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Fuel Prices Have Spiked More in ‘Energy Independent’ US Than in Nations That Have Moved Away From Oil and Gas
"The only real energy independence from the Middle East is renewables," said one policy expert.
May 05, 2026
Average gas prices in the United States are quickly climbing toward $5 per gallon this week as US President Donald Trump's war with Iran shows little sign of resolution.
Where average prices were about $2.98 the day before the war's launch, they had shot up to $4.48 as of Tuesday, according to AAA's gas price tracker, as Iran's restriction of ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz has squeezed global oil shipping and the shipping of other fuel sources like liquefied natural gas (LNG), causing global price hikes.
And while Trump has touted America’s supposed “energy independence” as an ace in the hole, achieved by ratcheting up fossil fuel production while canceling solar and wind power projects, data shows that the US has been hit harder by the price shocks than any other major economy in the world, with those that have embraced renewable energy being especially resilient.
Although the US leads the world in oil production by a large margin, data from JP Morgan Commodities research, analyzed Friday by MarketWatch, showed that between February 23 and April 27, the US experienced about a 42% increase in gas prices, the fifth-highest in the world.
"The spike in US gasoline prices over the past two months has outpaced everywhere except Southeast Asia, the region most dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf," explained Yahoo Finance geopolitics reporter Jake Conley.
Rebecca Babin, senior energy trader and managing director at CIBC Private Wealth, explained to MarketWatch last week that while increased fuel production gives the US a "buffer," oil is a global market and "it doesn’t operate in a vacuum." She said, "Global tightness and domestic bottlenecks still show up in gasoline prices."
Meanwhile, some of the countries that have best survived the price hikes include France and Spain, which derive large shares of their power from nuclear energy and renewables, respectively.
Craig Hanson and Jessica Isaacs, a pair of researchers at the World Resources Institute, explained last month that while a mix of factors is at play, countries less reliant on fossil fuels generally "find themselves in a better position to withstand the current crisis."
"Every country has homegrown access to at least two clean energy resources—the sun shines, and the wind blows just about everywhere at some point," they said. "The same cannot be said of oil and gas, where production is concentrated in a small number of countries and exposed to geopolitical disruption."
"Renewable resources like wind, solar, and geothermal have zero fuel costs, and the fuel cost of nuclear power is quite low. Again, the same cannot be said of fossil fuels, which have costs set by volatile global markets," they added. "These two advantages are why some of the world’s clean energy frontrunners are faring better than other countries amidst the Iranian energy crisis."
As Reuters reported in late April, the contrast between Europe's biggest gas guzzlers and green energy adopters is particularly stark.
While Albania has kept energy prices in check and even lowered them compared to last year by using its large system of hydroelectric dams, which supply much of its power, countries like Germany and Italy, which still rely heavily on gas, have seen electricity prices spike.
Hanson and Isaacs noted that while clean energy investments have helped soften the blow of global price shocks, the effects are not the same across the board. While price hikes for the electricity used to power factories, homes, and cars have been blunted by the availability of alternative energy sources, others, like heat—which are more reliant on natural gas—have still been affected.
Still, though, they said the crisis has shown that in addition to environmental sustainability, "clean energy systems’ greatest benefits today might actually be price stability and domestic energy resilience."
While Trump has continued his efforts to choke off any federal investment in renewable energy and double down on oil and gas production, other nations have taken the war’s price hikes as a sign to further accelerate their transition away from fossil fuels.
Germany and several other European Union members, for example, have announced expedited timelines to expand offshore wind and solar investments, explicitly citing the volatility in oil markets caused by the war.
Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the energy price shocks showed that "the only real energy independence from the Middle East is renewables."
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‘Really Chilling’: Trump Judicial Nominees Refuse to Say He's Not Eligible for 3rd Term
"The language of the constitutional amendment... makes it clear that no, he is not eligible for a third term," Sen. Chris Coons informed one Trump judicial nominee.
May 05, 2026
Political observers are expressing alarm after several of President Donald Trump's lifetime judicial nominees refused to say whether he is eligible to run for a third term.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) asked Trump judicial nominee John Marck to describe the 22nd Amendment of the US Constitution, which states that "no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice."
"The 22nd Amendment... senator, my career has mostly been in criminal prosecution, I haven't had an opportunity to use that one, specifically," Marck replied.
JUST IN: A Trump judicial nominee was asked point blank: is Trump eligible to run for a third term?
Their answer: “I would have to review the actual wording…”
Sen. Chris Coons then asked every nominee in the room to confirm the Constitution bars a third term.
Silence.
Every… pic.twitter.com/LzUZxFzaOL
— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) May 4, 2026
"Anyone able to help on the 22nd Amendment?" Coons asked the other judicial nominees at the hearing, one of whom explained that it was the amendment that sets a two-term limit for the presidency.
"Correct," Coons replied. "It states that no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice. Mr. Marck, is President Trump eligible to run again for president in 2028?"
"Senator, without considering all the facts and looking at everything, depending on what the situation is, this, to me, strikes as something more of a hypothetical..."
"It's not a hypothetical," Coons interjected. "Has President Trump been elected president twice?"
"President Trump has been certified as president of the United States two times," Marck acknowledged.
"Is he eligible to run for a third term under our Constitution?" Coons asked.
"Uhm, I would have to review the..." Marck began before Coons again interjected.
"All I need to tell you is the language of the constitutional amendment that makes it clear that no, he is not eligible for a third term," the senator said.
Coons then challenged other Trump judicial nominees at the hearing—Southern District of Florida nominee Jeffrey Kuntz, Southern District of Texas nominee Arthur Roberts Jones, and Northern District of Ohio nominee Michael Hendershot—to say if they believed the Constitution barred Trump from running for a third term, and none of them did.
After watching video of Coons' exchange with Trump judicial nominees, investigative journalist and author Nick Bryant declared the whole episode to be "really chilling."
"Like a scene from a dystopian movie, and alarming for anyone who cares about democracy," Bryant wrote in a Monday social media post. "A judicial nominee flagrantly flouting the Constitution about Trump's eligibility for a third term. The Constitution is unambiguous. He is not eligible."
Former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson noted that the Trump nominees were "not even pretending to honor the Constitution" during the hearing, while former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) simply declared the entire exchange "unreal."
While the chances of Trump being allowed to stand for an unconstitutional third term at the moment are very low, the president has repeatedly teased plans to run for president again in 2028, telling an audience on Monday that he would be leaving the White House "eight or nine years from now."
Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor and current professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, said that Trump's declared intention to run for a third term should not be brushed off as mere trolling.
"This is how he started with the whole 'if I lose the election is fraudulent' shtick," she wrote. "If we don’t listen to this, shame on us. That man isn’t building a ballroom for the next guy."
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House Democrats Urge US State Dept to End Silence About Israel’s Nuclear Weapons
"Washington’s silence on the program is indefensible amid the war in Iran and the acute threat of military escalation, they argue. And they are right," said one arms control expert.
May 05, 2026
More than two dozen Democratic lawmakers in the US House of Representatives are urging the Trump administration to break its official silence on Israel's nuclear weapons program, whose existence is almost universally acknowledged even as its origins and status remain shrouded in secrecy.
In a letter to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday, the group of House Democrats led by Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas wrote that "Congress has a constitutional responsibility to be fully informed about the nuclear balance in the Middle East, the risk of escalation by any party to this conflict, and the administration's planning and contingencies for such scenarios," particularly as it wages war on Iran in partnership with the Israeli government.
"The risks of miscalculation, escalation, and nuclear use in this environment are not theoretical," the lawmakers wrote. "A policy of official ambiguity about the nuclear capabilities of one party to this conflict makes coherent nonproliferation policy in the Middle East impossible, for Iran, for Saudi Arabia, and for every other state in the region making decisions based on their perceptions of the capabilities of their neighbors."
The House Democrats pressed Rubio to provide detailed information the US possesses about Israel's nuclear weapons program, including the country's current fissile material capability, nuclear doctrine, and "any indications of Israel planning to use or deploy nuclear weapons during the recent Iran conflict or during other conflicts."
Israeli leaders have for decades maintained a posture of deliberate ambiguity regarding their country's nuclear weapons capacity, even as some officials have at times tacitly acknowledged the nation's nukes—including by suggesting they could be dropped on Gaza—and falsely claimed that Iran was on the verge of creating a nuclear weapon.
Israel is believed to have begun producing nuclear weapons in the 1960s, helped in part by uranium that US intelligence agencies suspected was obtained from a factory in the United States.
Analysts estimate that Israel currently has between 90 and 300 nuclear warheads, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
"The United States’ indulgence of Israeli nuclear weapons has not escaped international attention, and the evident hypocrisy has undermined US nonproliferation policy," Victor Gilinsky, a former commissioner of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and Leonard Weiss, a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, wrote in a March op-ed for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
"The US government’s public position continues to be that it does not know anything about Israeli nuclear weapons, and this will apparently continue until Israel releases the United States’ gag," Gilinsky and Weiss continued. "This policy is allegedly enforced by a secret federal bulletin that threatens disciplinary actions for any US official who publicly acknowledges Israel’s nuclear weapons."
Experts and anti-war campaigners applauded the group of House Democrats for demanding an end to the US government's official silence on Israel's nuclear weapons program.
"Washington’s silence on the program is indefensible amid the war in Iran and the acute threat of military escalation, they argue. And they are right," said Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association.
The advocacy group Win Without War thanked Castro and his colleagues for "breaking DC’s 'taboo' over the Israeli government's nuclear weapons—especially concerning as US and Israeli leaders wage a disastrous war of choice in the Middle East."
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