Oil and Gas Industry’s Mating Call Strikes a Sour Note
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The U.S. oil and gas industry has sounded its mating call to the incoming Presidential administration with a policy wish list remarkable for its unabated pursuit of profits and defiance of climate science and economic trends.
The American Petroleum Institute (API) released a “policy roadmap” addressed to President-elect Donald Trump on November 12 outlining five “actions” he can take to bolster their agenda. However, the “actions”—given euphemistic titles like “protect consumer choice”—actually aim to roll back science-based environmental protections in order to maximize already massive profits. The policy details within each action roughly correspond with recommendations in Project 2025, the infamous policy agenda penned in part by figures from the first Trump administration and supported by several anti-climate organizations.
Here’s a breakdown of the roadmap’s requests along with an explanation of how they would roll back environmental progress.
Fight clean cars. API’s first policy proposal is repealing rules designed to support the shift to electric vehicles that the oil and gas industry has fought for decades. API specifically targets Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules to reduce carbon emissions from automobile tailpipes and fuel economy standards established by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. As UCS has pointed out, these rules are necessary because they use different avenues for reducing carbon emissions in both the short term (by requiring more efficient gasoline-powered vehicles) and the long term (by targeting a transition to electric vehicles).
API also targets an EPA waiver for a 2022 California rule that would reduce pollution from new gasoline-powered cars while increasing sales requirements for zero-emission vehicles. Emissions from transportation are the largest source of global warming emissions in the United States, according to the EPA. The Advanced Clean Cars II rule would require 100% EV sales in California by 2035 and strengthen tailpipe emissions standards, resulting in an estimated 1,200 fewer deaths from air pollution by 2040. The rule required a waiver because it’s stronger than the federal Clean Air Act, and 13 states have already approved similar standards. While API says the rule would limit public choice, it would actually increase choice by giving buyers an adequate electric vehicle inventory to meet rising demand.
Pump up gas. The second policy proposal is to reinstate permitting of liquified natural gas (LNG), also known as methane, a fossil fuel that is a potent source of global warming emissions. The Biden administration temporarily paused pending approvals for new LNG export authorizations in January 2024, citing the need to update the review process to best reflect impacts on climate, domestic energy prices, and health—especially as borne by frontline communities. The decision was spurred in part by the outcry over Calcasieu Pass 2, a proposed export terminal in Louisiana that would have entrenched even more fossil-fuel infrastructure on the Gulf Coast, an area already choked with it. API fumed (pun intended) over the announcement, even though the United States is already the world leader in LNG exports and is on track to double them by 2028.
Reverse protections for public land and health. The third policy proposal focuses on federal lands that API believes should be opened up to drilling, both onshore and offshore. It recommends repealing a Bureau of Land Management rule that would put conservation on equal footing with drilling and ranching as a legal use of public lands, in addition to adding more leasing opportunities from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s offshore leasing program. API markets these proposals as bolstering the country’s geopolitical strength. In reality, any effort by the world’s largest historical polluter to relentlessly expand fossil fuel production without regard for environmental and health impacts would undermine the nation’s leadership role.
But the most blatantly anti-climate demand in this area would repeal a Congressionally approved fee on every metric ton of methane that high-emitting oil and gas facilities produce above specific levels. The oil and gas industry is responsible for 30 percent of human-caused methane emissions. The Inflation Reduction Act provides $1 billion in financial and technical assistance specifically intended to help companies reduce methane emissions, which apparently wasn’t enough for an industry that has reaped record profits in the past three years. The request is just the latest tactic in API’s campaign of deflection and delay over methane regulation, which recently included filing a lawsuit to stop the fee. This is despite the claim in API’s 2021 Climate Action Framework to “support cost-effective policies and direct regulation that achieve methane emission reductions.”
Muzzle environmental reviews. The fourth policy proposal involves the federal permitting process, a perennial enemy of the fossil fuel industry. The statute in their crosshairs is the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), which the industry has fought since it was signed into law by Republican President Richard Nixon in the 1970s. API and Project 2025 sing from the same sheet in their NEPA-related demands, which would curtail scientific and environmental reviews, limit public notice and comment, and block access to the courts. By asking Trump to repeal “Biden-era NEPA rules,” API resumes the policy ping-pong over the statute in hopes of regressing to the first Trump administration’s “reforms.” Those rules removed any mention of cumulative impact analysis, a scientifically-backed method of measuring the combined effect of environmental harms rather than addressing only single measures.
Preserve industry giveaways. API finishes off its wish list with requests to preserve fossil fuel industry tax breaks that cost taxpayers some $3 billion each year, regardless of how much they’re currently paying at the pump. Tax breaks are one of the enticements Trump reportedly dangled before oil industry leaders (including at least one API member) at a dinner at which he promised a substantial return on investment for a $1 billion campaign donation.
Some may say API’s letter to the administration is just the sign of a trade association doing its job. But API is not just any trade association: It’s the largest oil and gas industry organization in the U.S., with more than 600 members. API flexes formidable political muscle, with its policy submissions to the previous Trump administration entering the regulatory record practically verbatim. The organization poured millions of dollars into a campaign making the case for expanded U.S. fossil fuel exploration, production and exports once the presidential election started picking up steam earlier this year.
More dubiously, API has been aware of the threat their products posed to the global climate from as early as 1959, when physicist Edward Teller described the effect of burning oil on global warming at an API function. In the years since, a task force convened by API authored an infamous memo on sowing uncertainty about the climate crisis, created an “astroturf” lobbying group to fight climate legislation, and spent more than half a million dollars to promote gas as a “climate solution.” A 2024 report from a bicameral Congressional investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s climate deception found that API “serves as a hub for industry coordination against climate progress.”
API’s lobbying of the incoming administration may not be different than its past actions, but this moment in history is. Scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows that a rapid and steep decline in the production and use of fossil fuels—with a goal to get to zero—is the only way to reduce heat-trapping emissions to a level that will preserve human and planetary health. Yet the U.S. is producing more oil and gas than ever before, having achieved “energy independence” years ago. Meanwhile, the renewable energy sources that will replace fossil fuels have reached new levels of affordability and accessibility since Trump was last in Washington. These facts show that API’s requests aren’t about driving down prices for consumers—they’re about making still more money for a rapacious industry.
API’s roadmap mirrors the industry tactics currently at work on the other side of the world at the United Nations’ Conference of the Parties climate negotiations, known as COP29. As my colleague Kathy Mulvey observes, the massive fossil fuel industry presence at the talks illustrates just how much the industry thinks it has to lose in the energy transition, and how desperate it is to squeeze every last dime from the status quo.
API has always played dirty, and the next four years may see more mudslinging as the fossil fuel industry tries to get its way. That’s why climate science—and the scientists behind it—must be protected. See the UCS information hub on the incoming administration for details on how UCS plans to defend scientific safeguards.