David Bookbinder, the organization’s director of law and policy, said the Trump administration is using the “pretext of a national energy emergency” to ask a federal agency to circumvent environmental protections to justify building more fossil fuel power plants.
Trump has opened more land for oil and gas lease sales, shifting away from Biden's efforts to protect environmentally sensitive areas like Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuge and to prevent large swaths of ocean from being available for offshore drilling, including major areas off coasts in the Pacific, Atlantic and parts of Alaska.
President Donald Trump began dismantling his predecessor’s climate change and renewable energy policies on his first day in office, declaring a national energy emergency to speed up fossil fuel development – a policy he has summed up as “drill, baby, drill.”.
They point out that the U.S. is producing more oil and natural gas than any other country and the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act boosted renewable energy at a critical time, creating jobs and addressing the climate change threat – 2024 was Earth's hottest year on record amid the hottest 10-year stretch on record.
Trump's energy emergency calls, for example, for undermining Endangered Species Act protections to ensure fast energy development, even assembling a rarely used committee — the so-called “God Squad” — that could have authority to dismiss significant threats to species.
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