

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.


Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
One of them described her job as offering “concierge, white-glove service” to oil, gas, and coal companies seeking permits from regulators.
A top energy adviser to President Donald Trump admitted in an August interview that the administration is offering "concierge, white-glove service" to fossil fuel companies while blocking and defunding clean energy projects.
The comments, reported Tuesday by the Washington Post, came from Brittany Kelm, a senior policy adviser for Trump's National Energy Dominance Council (NEDC), which was established within the Department of the Interior in February.
"We're like this little tiger team, concierge, white-glove service, essentially," Kelm said on the Lobby Shop podcast, "We were put together very particularly with the president's priorities in mind on energy. So keeping coal plants open, establishing critical mineral mining domestically, and then that broader supply chain."
She described her role in the council as being to help oil, gas, and coal companies navigate "the politicals" of agencies that grant permits for new projects. Companies, she said, "can walk out of our office, and they have all the contacts they need" for regulators in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the departments of the Interior and Commerce.
"We know how to unstick what is stuck," Kelm said. "It's a lot of undoing old policies and getting rid of regulatory burdens."
Mahyar Sorour, the director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Fossil Fuels policy project, responded: "The reality of fossil fuel companies getting white-glove, concierge service from the Trump administration would be comical if it weren't so sinister."
"During the election," she continued, "Trump told oil and gas executives that he would clear the way for more production without any safeguards if they gave his campaign a billion dollars—they did, and now Trump is blocking clean energy and giving the oil and gas industry immense handouts in return."
Since retaking office in January, Trump has sought to expand the production of oil, gas, and coal with reckless abandon, without regard to the impacts of carbon emissions on the planet or other environmental impacts of pollution.
As the rest of the world has surged its use of wind and solar projects, surpassing coal for the first time this year, the Department of Energy made a $625 million investment to "expand and reinvigorate the coal industry," which is the dirtiest form of energy.
And July's massive GOP budget contained billions of dollars worth of handouts for the fossil fuel industry, boosted drilling on millions of acres of public lands, mandated oil and gas lease sales, and imposed new fees on renewable development.
At the same time, Trump has singlehandedly reduced the US's growth outlook for renewables by 45%, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
As the Post reports:
His administration has held up permits for solar and wind projects since July and blocked wind farms outright. The Energy Department last week canceled $7.6 billion in funding for projects aimed at curbing climate change including installation of renewables, grid upgrades and carbon capture projects. That's on top of $27 billion in funding for clean energy that the Environmental Protection Agency is seeking to claw back.
Alan Zibel, an energy and environmental policy researcher for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, joked that while the "White House rolls out 'concierge, white-glove service' for fossil fuels... wind and solar aren't even allowed inside the Motel 6."
This is put on stark display by a report co-authored by Zibel, and released Monday by Public Citizen and the Revolving Door Project, which found that, under Trump, the agencies in charge of regulating energy and environmental policy "have made dozens of hires from the fossil fuel sector, mining conglomerates, and other polluting industries, as well as others who are well-paid to support a dirty energy agenda, such as corporate lawyers and the staffers from far-right think tanks directly tied to Trump's dirty energy agenda."
The report examined 111 executive branch appointees tasked with energy and environmental policymaking across nine agencies and found that 43 are former employees of fossil fuel companies.
While the EPA and Energy Department are each crawling with more than a dozen industry plants, no agency has more than the Interior Department, which has 32 in total.
One of them is Kelm herself, who, according to the report, "has spent her entire career working in Big Oil, most recently doing corporate relations for Shell, and previously in policy for Valero, community affairs for Noble Energy, and other roles for Texas-based oil companies like EnCore Permian and the Permian Basin Petroleum Association."
Far from just lower-level appointees, several agency heads have direct industry ties. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright was formerly the CEO of the hydraulic fracking company Liberty Energy and, according to the report, "regularly makes public statements that downplay the effects of climate change, carbon pollution, and the environmental impacts of fracking."
The administration also contains at least 14 corporate lawyers who worked for fossil fuel interests. David Fotouhi, the assistant secretary of the EPA, formerly worked as a lawyer at Gibson Dunn, which has represented oil and gas giants like the American Petroleum Institute, ConocoPhillips, and Energy Transfer. The law firm also helped to advise polluters like Chevron on how to beat lawsuits from state and local governments seeking to hold them legally liable for spreading misinformation about the climate crisis.
The administration also includes at least 12 officials directly handpicked from right-wing think tanks backed by fossil fuel money. Brooke Rollins, secretary of the Department of Agriculture (USDA), helped found the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) in 2021 with Texas oil billionaire and GOP megadonor Tim Dunn.
The oilman funded Rollins' organization to the tune of $400,000, with the explicit goal of staffing the next Republican administration with appointees who would gut US climate policy.
"It would be ideal if we could get rid of this ‘CO2 as a pollutant' business," Dunn said at an AFPI event in 2023.
"Texas-based billionaires have taken over the Trump administration, providing a steady stream of staffers and an extreme set of policy ideas that consciously favors the most polluting forms of energy," said Toni Aguilar Rosenthal, a senior researcher with the Revolving Door Project. "Trump's policies aid the fossil fuel industry's exploitation of the public sphere for private profit while simultaneously sabotaging renewables and ensuring that the US remains trapped in a dirty energy economy."
From one corner of the continent to the other, Americans figured out dozens of ways to make their hopes for the future felt, even in this darkest of political periods.
Your correspondent is…bushed, so excuse typos, lapses of thought, and imprecise prose. But I wanted to tell all of you about how Sun Day played out across the country on Sunday before I fell into bed. In a word, spectacular.
You know, from reading these missives, that this day has been in the works a long time; we needed, in the face of massive and bizarre attacks from the White House and Congress on sun and wind power, to stand up for the idea of cheap, clean energy. At nearly 500 events across the country, that’s what happened. From one corner of the continent to the other (still waiting for pictures to come in from Alaska and Hawaii) Americans figured out dozens of ways to make their hopes for the future felt, even in this darkest of political periods. A remarkable account in the New York Times quoted one organizer, summing it up beautifully:
“I really wanted it to be celebratory and uplifting,” said Laura Iwanaga, who led the organization for Portland’s Sun Day event for the local chapter of Third Act, a nationwide climate advocacy organization founded by Mr. McKibben. “We all know what we’re fighting against, but we don’t always think about what we’re fighting for.”
For me, the very first picture of the day came from my grandson, out to greet the rising sun.
Soon they were pouring in from events across the country. Many featured big crowds and important people: I was in New York, where people crammed into a downtown church to hear the city’s comptroller Brad Lander talk about deploying the city’s $300 billion pension fund to back clean energy...
...and then spilled out into a nearby park for speeches from a US senator (Peter Welch), the state’s remarkable lieutenant governor (Antonio Delgado), a state assemblywoman (Emily Gallagher), and the ever-present and ever-powerful Rev. Lennox Yearwood. Oh, and a unforgettable rendition of "Here Comes the Sun" from Sun Day musical ambassador Antonique Smith.
Those were powerful memories that will last my life. But I was also taken by the pictures that showed quieter moments—for instance, people huddled in basements so that they could see their neighbor’s heat pumps or solar inverters, demystifying the whole process of converting to clean power. This is from South Carolina—and it’s how we’re going to turn people into solar consumers across the country.
And here are Wisconsites setting out on a solar tour of the state’s capital.
Some of the images were spectacularly beautiful. Christal Brown choreographed a dance among the solar panels on the campus of Middlebury College.
And some were literally sweet—here’s someone making s’mores in a solar oven in San Leandro, California.
Everywhere the beauty of the logo (thanks Brian Collins, Beth Johnson, Eron Lutterman) was on display. (Oh, and read the account of its design from Fast Company).
So many people and organizations helped make the day happen: Fossil Free Media, of course, with Jamie Henn and Deirdre Shelly leading an amazing crew; Solar United Neighbors, the Sierra Club, Mothers Out Front, Climate Revival, Green Faith, Dayenu, a hundred more. My colleagues at Third Act were absolutely crucial: here’s Deborah Moore and Anna Goldstein, who worked around the clock.
But everywhere there were kids out enjoying the spectacle. Our great hope is that they’ll grow up in a world where it seems utterly obvious to power the planet with clean energy from the sun, instead of filling the air (and their lungs) with the smoke from humanity’s fires.
For a day it was possible to believe in all of that—and the human energy that belief unleashes allows us to make it happen. Even as the afternoon went on, I was hearing of plans to introduce balcony solar laws in half a dozen states (and of plans to take this day global in the years ahead). In some sense the work has just begun.
I’ll have many more images and reports in the days ahead—we’ve barely begun to sift through all that’s been pouring in these last hours. But time for a well-earned rest (and I have an early morning trip to Chicago—the beat goes on!). As the sun goes down (and the batteries that have been soaking up sunshine all afternoon kick in) I just want to say: Thank you all so very very much
The fossil fuel industry spent big to push through a $1 billion provision in the GOP budget bill, which the senators said would allow some oil companies to "pay no federal income taxes whatsoever."
Four Democratic U.S. senators are demanding an explanation from Big Oil after a $1.1 billion tax loophole was added to the Senate version of the GOP's budget reconciliation megabill.
Letters sent Thursday by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called out the CEOs of two oil giants, ConocoPhillips and Ovintiv, which they say "lobbied furiously" for the handout.
The companies, the senators said, "[stand] to benefit tremendously from this provision and ha[ve] spent big to support it—while preserving the many government subsidies for the oil and gas industry already in the tax code."
They asked for the companies to disclose how much they have spent lobbying Republicans for the tax break and how much of a windfall they expect in return.
The provision in question, approved by the Senate Finance Committee last week, would shield many large oil companies from the Inflation Reduction Act's corporate alternative minimum tax, or CAMT. Introduced in 2022, the CAMT requires that companies making more than $1 billion pay 15% of the profits they report to shareholders.
"The rationale for CAMT was simple," the senators said. "For far too long, massive corporations had taken advantage of loopholes in the tax code to avoid paying their fair share, sometimes paying zero federal taxes despite earning billions in profits."
The GOP bill modifies how oil companies are required to report earnings, allowing them to exempt "intangible drilling and development costs," which in turn allows more companies to fall below the $1 billion earnings threshold.
The senators highlighted a 2023 earnings call by Marathon Oil, recently acquired by ConocoPhillips, in which executives said the CAMT was the only income tax they were required to pay.
"If enacted," the senators said, "this provision would reduce or even eliminate tax liabilities for oil and gas companies under CAMT, allowing some to pay no federal income taxes whatsoever."
The letter highlighted lobbying filings by ConocoPhillips and Ovintiv in which they "explicitly prioritize" securing this handout.
Referenced throughout is the aggressive effort to court Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who wrote the loophole into the Senate bill. According to OpenSecrets, Lankford received more than $546,000 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry—his top source of industry donations—between 2019 and 2024.
The senators described the industry's lobbying as "especially insulting" because "Senate Republicans are trying to pay for this handout with cuts to other programs that would end up raising energy prices for everyday Americans."
The GOP bill would eliminate tax breaks for clean energy that incentivize consumers to purchase electric vehicles and make their homes more energy-efficient, including the home energy-efficiency and residential clean energy credits.
Citing data from Rewiring America, the senators estimated that ditching the two credits would cost the average household up to $2,200 per year in savings on utility bills.
The Center for American Progress projects that eliminating electric vehicle credits would increase demand for gasoline, raising prices by 27 to 35 cents per gallon by 2035. Americans will pay the oil and gas industry "an additional $339 billion for gasoline and $75 billion for electricity by 2035," the May report says.
" Congress should not raise energy prices for working families to deliver handouts to Big Oil," the senators said.