Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Companies and individuals linked to the fossil fuel industry donated more than $19 million to Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, new Global Witness analysis reveals. The analysis, based on itemised data published by the US Federal Election Commission, identified 47 individual donations from November 2024 to January 2025, accounting for around 7.8% of the total $245 million raised by the fund. Presidential inaugural funds are used to cover the costs of inauguration events, such as parades, galas and receptions.
Donald Trump used funds from his first inaugural fund in 2017 to organise a party at his own hotel, for which he was sued by the D.C. Attorney General. Of fossil fuel-linked donors, US oil giant Chevron made the largest contribution – $2 million – and was the joint fourth-largest donor overall. A string of other fossil fuel companies made donations of $1 million, including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Occidental Petroleum. A Chevron spokesperson said that “Chevron has a long tradition of celebrating democracy by supporting the inaugural committees of both parties” and that they were “proud to have done so again this year.” None of the other companies mentioned above responded to our inquiries.
In his inaugural address, Donald Trump promised to “drill, baby, drill” and said that the US “will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it”. In the following months, the President signed a blitz of Executive Orders aimed at boosting the fossil fuel industry and kneecapping federal climate action. These include:
Opening up federal lands and waters to fossil fuel exploration as official US policy and revoking several climate action policies;
Establishing a new group to advise his office on how to accelerate the ‘permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, and transportation’ of oil and gas;
Removing regulations on coal production to revive the flagging industry; and,
Ordering the US Attorney General to quash state-level “polluters pay” laws that would push fossil fuel companies to pay their fair share of climate damages.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Global Witness Senior Data Investigator Nicu Calcea said: “It’s no surprise the oil and gas industry handed millions to Donald Trump for his inauguration, and they seem to have reaped a huge return on their investment.
“Every month that Donald Trump has been in power, we’ve seen a raft of anti-climate measures come out which are music to the fossil fuel industry’s ears. From plans to steamroll through dirty new coal plants, to the attempted quashing of ‘polluter pays’ laws that would hold oil giants accountable, it’s clear where his political priorities lie.
“While Trump sides with his friends in oil and gas, we must keep up the fight for a fair, green future – that means pushing for wind and solar where we live, backing polluters pay bills, and resisting the development of oil, gas and coal projects across the country.”
Many of the world’s worst environmental and human rights abuses are driven by the exploitation of natural resources and corruption in the global political and economic system. Global Witness is campaigning to end this. We carry out hard-hitting investigations, expose these abuses, and campaign for change. We are independent, not-for-profit, and work with partners around the world in our fight for justice.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Expected greenhouse gas emissions from US oil and gas fields has jumped under Trump, after previously dropping under Biden, forecasts show. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
Tariff chaos hampers Trump’s pledge to ‘drill, baby, drill’, but analysis still shows surge in planet-heating emissions
Donald Trump’s ambitions for the US to “drill, baby, drill” for more fossil fuels have ironically been hampered by the economic chaos unleashed by his own tariffs, but the US is still on track to increase oil and gas extraction, causing a surge in planet-heating emissions, a new analysis shows.
The US was already the world’s leading oil and gas power, producing more of the fossil fuels than any country in history during Joe Biden’s administration. But Trump has sought to escalate this further, declaring an “energy emergency” to open up more land and ocean for drilling and launching an unprecedented assault on environmental regulations in his first 100 days back in the White House.
This new political climate means that the expected amount of greenhouse gas emissions from active and planned projects in US oil and gas fields has jumped under Trump, after previously dropping under Biden, forecasts shared with the Guardian show.
Despite awarding more drilling leases than Trump in his first 100 days, Biden also pursued policies to combat the climate crisis that saw oil and gas companies revise down their production estimates. That situation has now reversed, threatening a pulse of new pollution that will further add to the fever of a planet already suffering from heatwaves, floods, droughts and other disasters accelerated by global heating.
“The uptick in embodied emissions from forecast US oil and gas production is worrying,” said Olivier Bois von Kursk, policy adviser at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, which tracks emissions projections from the lifetime of projects, based on data from research consultancy Rystad Energy. “The world can’t afford more climate chaos.”
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The International Energy Agency, which has forecast that global oil and gas demand will peak by 2030, has said that no new major fossil fuel projects can occur if the world is to stay within agreed temperature limits and avoid catastrophic climate impacts. Last year was the hottest, worldwide, ever recorded and governments are collectively failing to meet targets to avert escalating disasters.
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Tariffs on solar panels from Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia have been ratcheted up to as much as 3,521%. “We don’t want windmills in this country,” the president said shortly after his inauguration in January. “We don’t want windmills. You know what else people don’t like? Those massive solar fields.”
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves at the Labour Party Conference at the ACC Liverpool, September 23, 2024
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One of Labour’s few redistributive policies attempting to tap the immense wealth of the filthy rich — a crackdown on the abuse of non-dom status to avoid tax — is to be softened, Chancellor Rachel Reeves says, because she has been “listening to the concerns” raised by the non-dom “community.”
She won’t listen to concerns over children trapped in poverty by the discriminatory two-child benefit cap.
Or over the impact of restricting winter fuel payments when energy prices are twice what they were a couple of years ago, even when those concerns convince her own party to vote against the policy at its conference, and prompt Labour’s biggest affiliate Unite to challenge the government in court.
Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.
Or even over the U-turn on compensating the Waspi women, despite leading Labour politicians having championed their cause for years.
Reeves’s selective approach to people’s concerns applies to the environment too, even as yet another severe storm closes schools and transport systems, and despite years of worsening floods and failing crops. Sod the science, says Reeves, growth trumps net zero.
Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Limiting action on the accelerating climate catastrophe to measures which don’t affect corporate profits is one reason the world continues to warm uncontrollably.
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Labour’s growth policies across the board simply turn government into a doormat for big business. Rather than publicly fund infrastructure projects in the public interest, Labour will scrap regulations to weaken rights to object to construction by the private sector.
Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.
The same deference to the right of construction firms to do as they please applies to housing. But it is not over-regulation which stymies house-building in Britain but land-banking aimed at keeping prices high. Urban development in major cities like London and Manchester is blighted by developers’ lack of accountability to communities, as working-class neighbourhoods are driven out by construction of luxury flats designed to accumulate value, not house locals.
Keir Starmer confirms that his government is cnutier than Suella Braverman on killing the right to protest.
The question of the day is democracy versus capitalism. Defending our communities and rights as citizens means building resistance through any means we can: trades councils, People’s Assembly branches, even Morning Star supporters’ groups can be hubs to bring activists together. The future is looking ugly if we cannot unite to do that.
Climate scientists are probably among those most aggrieved by Donald Trump’s return as US president.
Trump has scoffed at the increasingly dire warnings of these scientists and declared his enthusiasm for digging up and burning the coal, oil and gas that is overheating Earth. His empowerment of the far right dims prospects for collective solutions to collective problems, but what is he likely to change about US climate policy?
Trump has not published a climate agenda. To discern his impact on domestic and international policy, we have to sift through statements, appointments to political positions and the record of his first term.
Here, our academics glean grim portents for the years ahead – and some continuities with supposedly pro-climate presidents of the past.
1. It’s still ‘drill, baby, drill’
Trump’s three-word campaign slogan, “drill, baby, drill”, is intended to sum up his plans for the US oil and gas industry. It’s also an apt summary of existing US energy policy.
Since 2008, when Democrat Barack Obama was elected, oil production has soared from a 50-year low of 6.8 billion barrels a day to 19.4 billion in 2023.
“The United States is already producing more crude oil than any country ever,” says Gautam Jain, an energy and finance expert at Columbia University.
“Oil and gas companies are buying back stocks and paying dividends to shareholders at a record pace, which they wouldn’t do if they saw better investment opportunities.”
2. We won’t always have Paris (or even Rio)
Trump withdrew the US from the 2015 Paris agreement on the first day of his second term (it took him six months to do it last time).
Jain frets that he may go further and exit international negotiations entirely, by rescinding his country’s membership of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was adopted in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
Rejoining would be “nearly impossible”, Jain says, as a future president would need the consent of two-thirds of the Senate.
The US risks dropping the mantle of climate leadership on China, he adds. A recent analysis by Oxford economists Matthew Carl Ives and Natalie Sum Yue Chung suggests that that ship may have sailed years ago.
“China already processes most of the clean energy supply materials and has an advanced manufacturing base that is more capable of scaling up production to meet the rising demand,” they say.
3. The bucks stop here?
A US retreat from international climate diplomacy would afflict people who are particularly vulnerable to the mounting crisis in Earth’s atmosphere. Jain highlights how Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden donated several billions of dollars more towards renewable energy and adaptation in the developing world, compared with Trump in his first term.
However, a 2023 study that estimated each country’s “fair share” of this climate finance pot according to income, population size and historical emissions, issued this withering assessment while Biden was president:
“Based on these metrics, we found that the US is overwhelmingly responsible for the climate finance shortfall,” says environmental economist Sarah Colenbrander (University of Oxford).
“The world’s largest economy should be providing US$43.5 billion of climate finance a year. In 2021, it gave just US$9.3 billion – a meagre 21% of its fair share.”
4. Biden’s green tax credits may endure…
Trump could keep some Biden-era investments in clean energy (tax breaks for investors in renewables, for example) as the benefits are accruing in Republican states, Jain says.
He may still cut tax credits for people buying electric vehicles, though. This would slow the transition from combustion-engine transport by making it harder for people to afford an EV. (Biden’s 100% tariff on Chinese-made EVs hasn’t help either).
5. … but his methane tax probably won’t
Jain predicts that the greatest damage inflicted by Trump will be to the regulation of fossil fuels and emissions. In his crosshairs is a federal charge for the release of methane from oil and gas wells and pipelines.
Biden identified cutting methane emissions as a potential brake on the accelerating pace of global heating. That’s because methane is a greenhouse gas that lingers in our atmosphere for decades instead of centuries like CO₂ and is far more potent in trapping heat during that time.
Reducing methane emissions could reduce climate change quickly – a climate action lifeline we will be sorry to see thrown away.
6. The nuclear option
Trump seems to have a soft spot for one low-carbon energy source: nuclear power. Perhaps because civil nuclear maintains the skills and supply chains needed for its military applications?
7. Up is down, left is right
Democrats may regret making “trust the science” their dividing line against Trump.
Eric Nast, an environmental governance expert at the University of Guelph, tracked how the first Trump administration altered language on US government websites.
He expects Trump to disguise his regulation bonfire as “strengthening transparency” (blocking air pollution standards that rely on private health data) and championing “citizen science” (dismissing academics from advisory boards for private citizens rich in time and money, who might benefit from scrapping rules and limiting scrutiny).
8. Fighting fire with money
Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg attended Trump’s second inauguration. Their presence – plus a pointed farewell speech by Biden – has provoked murmurs of “oligarchy”: rule by people whose immense wealth and influence has utterly captured ostensibly democratic societies.
“As public firefighters struggle to cope, affluent residents and businesses have turned to private firefighting services to protect their properties,” says Doug Specht, a University of Westminster geographer.
9. Arctic relations
What explains Trump’s sudden interest in the Arctic? Oil, gas and critical minerals newly liberated by thawing ice in a region warming four times faster than the global average says engineer Tricia Stadnyk at the University of Calgary.
“The second Trump administration is aware of both the new opportunities and risks as global temperatures shatter new records and thresholds, and an ice-free Arctic becomes a possibility,” she says.
In the wake of an Iowa primary election chilled in a record blast of cold weather – which scientists say may, counterintuitively, have been worsened by global heating – Republican presidential candidates are embracing the fossil fuel industry tighter than ever, with little to say about the growing toll the climate crisis is taking upon Americans.
The remaining contenders for the US presidential nomination – frontrunner Donald Trump, along with Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis – all used the Iowa caucus to promise surging levels of oil and gas drilling if elected, along with the wholesale abolition of Joe Biden’s climate change policies.
Trump, who comfortably won the Iowa poll, said “we are going to drill, baby, drill” once elected, in a Fox News town hall on the eve of the primary. “We have more liquid gold under our feet; energy, oil and gas than any other country in the world,” the multiply indicted former president said. “We have a lot of potential income.”
Trump also called clean energy a “new scam business” and went on a lengthy digression on how energy is important in the making of donuts and hamburgers.
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Last year was, globally, the hottest ever recorded, and scientists have warned of mounting calamities as the world barrels through agreed temperature limits. Last year, the US suffered a record number of disasters costing at least $1bn in damages, with the climate crisis spurring fiercer wildfires, storms and extreme heat.
Such concerns were largely unvoiced in frigid Iowa, however, apart from by young climate activists who disrupted rallies held by Trump, Haley and DeSantis. On Sunday, a 17-year-old activist from the Sunrise climate group interrupted a Trump speech to shout: “Mr Trump your campaign is funded by fossil fuel millionaires. Do you represent them, or ordinary people like me?”
