A Look At President-Elect Trump's Picks For The Key Energy Policy Positions

Over the past two weeks, President-elect Trump has engaged in rapid-fire announcements of his picks for the cabinet and other top positions. Among the announced selections are Trump’s nominees for the three top positions in climate and energy policy: EPA Administrator (Lee Zeldin), Secretary of Energy (Chris Wright), and Secretary of the Interior (Doug Burgum). In this post I will take a first look at these nominees.

Without doubt, these three Trump appointees will be an enormous improvement over the Biden administration functionaries they will replace (EPA Administrator Michael Regan, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland). The three outgoing Bidenauts are all committed fanatic climate warriors, fighting every day to restrict development and use of hydrocarbon fuels, and thus to make America weaker and Americans poorer. Having them in office has been like having the country’s energy policy under the control of a cabal of its worst enemies.

But is there anything about President-elect Trump’s nominees for these positions that we should be at least somewhat concerned about? Unfortunately, the answer is yes. The subject of my principal concern is the so-called “all of the above” approach to energy policy.

But first the good news. All of Zeldin, Wright and Burgum are on record as proponents of lifting restrictions on development and use of hydrocarbon fuels, getting the government out of the way, and of letting that sector of the economy flourish.

Of the three, Wright, the nominee for Energy Secretary, has been the most vocal and outspoken as a fossil fuels proponent. Wright’s current job is CEO of Liberty Energy, a major player in the business of “fracking” to develop oil and gas resources. A piece in Politico’s E&E News today calls Wright a “fossil fuel evangelist.” A prior piece from the same source a few days ago (November 18) has some choice quotes from Wright, including his saying that “there is no climate crisis” and that net-zero emissions goals “neither achievable nor humane.”

Burgum, the nominee for Interior Secretary, is the current governor of North Dakota, the third largest among oil-producing states. As governor, Burgum has presided over rapid and continuing development of the Bakken shale formation in that state. The Hill, in a piece on November 15, quotes Burgum making promises of “unleashing American energy dominance,” words that echo a frequent Trump refrain. At Interior, Burgum will have the authority to open up large tracts of federal lands that have been withheld from development under Biden.

Zeldin, the nominee for EPA Administrator, has less of a record on energy issues than the other two. His principal prior service consists of eight years in Congress, from January 2015 to January 2023, representing eastern Long Island. At the end of that time, he gave up his seat in Congress to run unsuccessfully for Governor of New York (however, losing by only about 6 points, 53-47, in this very blue state). Newsweek in a November 11 piece, notes that he is a “longtime opponent of climate regulation,” that he got very low scores from the League of Conservation Voters during his time in Congress, and that in his 2022 gubernatorial campaign he promised to lift New York’s ban on fracking that had been imposed by Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo.

So far, so good. However, all of these three nominees are tainted to greater or lesser degree by prior buy-in to the so-called “all of the above” energy policy, as well as to other schemes to fight the bogeyman of “carbon emissions.”

What’s wrong with the “all of the above” energy policy. This is the proposition that the government should promote all forms of energy development — not just fossil fuels, but also anything and everything else, from nuclear to hydro to geothermal to the “renewables” wind and solar. I had a post on this subject on November 2, just before the election. In that post I pointed out that while “all of the above” might sound obviously right as an energy policy, in practice there is a big problem:

In practice, “all of the above” is code for continuing and growing government subsidies to energy schemes that don’t work and that drive up consumer costs and impoverish the people. Under that banner, we’re growing huge corrupt industries of uneconomic energy producers dependent on the endless continuation and increase of destructive subsidies. Ending the subsidies could put these industries out of business overnight, so you should not be surprised that they are prepared to spend billions to buy politicians to keep the gravy flowing.

So where do Trump’s three nominees stand on this subject?

Start with Burgum. He became Governor of North Dakota in 2016. Even as North Dakota’s oil and gas resources have been rapidly developed during his tenure, the same has also been true for wind energy. From the EIA’s North Dakota energy profile:

Wind power generation more than doubled in the state from 2015 to 2023. In 2023, wind was the second-largest electricity generating source in North Dakota and provided nearly two-fifths of the state's net generation. The state ranked sixth in the nation in the share of its electricity generated from wind energy.

The problem here is that wind energy requires massive government subsidies, and also drives up electricity prices because it is incapable of supplanting reliable generation.

Then there is this about Burgum from the piece in The Hill:

As governor of North Dakota, Burgum set a goal in 2021 for the state to reach net-zero emissions by 2030. . . . However, his plan to meet that target did not include a transition away from fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change. Instead, Burgum said he wanted the state to use carbon capture and storage technology, which can prevent planet-warming emissions from entering the atmosphere, to reduce or offset its emissions.

Burgum gives the impression of being a smart guy. He certainly should be smart enough to understand why carbon capture and storage (CCS) is unlikely ever to be economical. Well, at least the subsidizing of CCS will not be under his jurisdiction as Interior Secretary.

Zeldin’s record on climate and energy issues is also somewhat mixed. From the Newsweek piece linked above:

Zeldin has expressed mixed views on climate change and environmental policy throughout his political career. . . . [H]e has supported some renewable energy initiatives, like extending solar investment tax credits and researching offshore wind potential. . . .

Those “solar investment tax credits” are precisely kinds of things that make the “all of the above” energy policy a cancer on the economy. Again, I suppose that the good news is that handing out or re-authorizing these kinds of subsidies will not be in Zeldin’s authority as EPA Administrator.

The guy mainly in charge of handing out the big subsidies and research grants is going to be Wright at the Department of Energy. Of the three Trump appointees discussed here, Wright has the strongest record with respect to the “all of the above” diversion, and in particular has been a vocal opponent of wind and solar. The November 21 Politico E&E piece linked above quotes Wright as follows as to wind and solar:

[H]e argued the government had gone too far in its attempts to green the economy by subsidizing renewables. “What I think the government’s doing catastrophically wrong is the vast majority of their money and subsidies are not for research, not for making technologies better,” Wright continued. “They’re deploying politically popular, low-energy density, intermittent, unreliable energy sources that have just destabilized our electricity, made energy more expensive, don’t really have a prospect of being a meaningful solution in the future.”

But then there are all kinds of other energy schemes angling for government handouts under the “all of the above” rubric. Politico E&E quotes Wright (referring to a former DOE grant-making official named Julio Friedman):

“What Julio is doing in carbon sequestration, on next generation nuclear, on next generation geothermal technologies — that can play a meaningful role going forward,” Wright said.

There’s CCS again. Nobody has made it work, and probably nobody ever will be able to make it work economically, but it just keeps popping up again and again with its hands out for government subsidies.

How about this as an energy policy for the incoming administration: the government rescinds the restrictive regulations, ends the handouts, and just lets the private sector develop whatever energy source may be the most efficient or profitable.