The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😜
Main Topic: Sinister AXPC and Trump Plans to Roll Back Biden’s Climate Reforms
Dear Diary. The critical U.S. election for our climate is only two weeks away as of today. It’s time for a friendly reminder of the night and day difference between Republicans and Democrats as of 2024. Republicans headed by Trump would almost immediately dismantle Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act initiatives, which are among the first forays into dealing with the climate crisis by any head of a major government. On top of that, Project 2025 would dismantle many U.S. government organizations, such as the National Center for Environmental Information, the consequence being that all scientists including yours truly would not be able to look up U.S. climate information or statistics. Dr. Michael Mann has stated that a Trump presidency would be game over for our climate since emissions would not be curbed.
Here is a new report from the Washington Post outlining Trump and Oil Companies’ sinister plans:
Oil trade group aligned with Trump drafts plans targeting climate rules – The Washington Post
Trump has vowed to gut climate rules. Oil lobbyists have a plan ready.
As companies fall short on methane flaring emission reductions, a top trade group has crafted a road map for dismantling key Biden administration rules.
Excess natural gas, which contains methane, is burned in a process called flaring at a well pad near Watford City, N.D., on Aug. 26, 2021. (Matthew Brown/AP)
By Evan Halper and Josh Dawsey
Updated October 18, 2024 at 3:02 p.m. EDT|Published October 18, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
An influential oil and gas industry group whose members were aggressively pursued for campaign cash by Donald Trump has drafted detailed plans for dismantling landmark Biden administration climate rules after the presidential election, according to internal documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The plans were drawn up by the American Exploration and Production Council, or AXPC, a group of 30 mostly independent oil and gas producers, including several major oil companies.They reveal a comprehensive industry effort to reverse climate initiatives advanced during the past nearly four years of Democratic leadership. At the same time, the documents contain confidential data showing that industry’s voluntary initiatives to cut emissions from burning natural gas have fallen short.
The lobbying blueprint takes particular aim at a new tax on emissions of methane, a gas that the International Energy Agency (IEA) says is responsible for nearly a third of human-caused global warming. The documents show the relative amounts of natural gas, including methane, burned by nine of 19 AXPC member companies that responded to an internal surveyare increasing — in many cases sharply. After this article was published online, AXPC said 11 other member companies had eliminated such emissions.
The policy plans, contained in documents distributed to a wide group of company executives at AXPC board meetings in April and August, also call for a repeal of more than a half-dozen executive orders that lie at the center of the Biden administration’s efforts to combat climate change. Taken together, the group’s goals amount to a monumental rollback of some of the most aggressive federal tools for cutting emissions.
The documents were obtained by Fieldnotes, a research group that focuses on climate change, and provided exclusively to The Post, which verified their authenticity. Parts of the road map were previously released publicly by AXPC, including its calls to unleash production and export of liquefied natural gas.
While AXPC says it would pursue the rollbacks regardless of who wins the November election, almost all the policies it targets for elimination and rewrite were enacted by the Biden administration. Trump has called climate change a hoax and signaled a willingness to embrace the industry’s agenda by pledging favorable policies as he urged fossil fuel companies to donate heavily to his campaign.
The agenda contrasts with the public pledges several AXPC members have made to their investors and customers to support aggressive regulation of methane and align with the 2016 Paris agreement on climate change, which aims to cut global emissions enough to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The AXPC action plan calls for killing a new fee on methane releases that many administration officials and environmental scholars say is crucial for pushing companies to cut flaring of methane, a process through which the gas is burned rather than trapped and used as energy.
Mark Bednar, the group’s vice president of communications, said AXPC supports methane regulations but opposes the fee.
“The data shows that the U.S. leads the world in emissions reduction because of the responsible production of oil and natural gas and we’re happy to engage any organization that wants to have a serious conversation on facts, science, and real solutions,” Bednar said in a statement.
The emergence of the AXPC plans follows a spring dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, during which the former president vowed to reverse the energy transition and call off federal regulators, according to people who attended. Executives from ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and three other AXPC companies were on the list of attendees provided by a Trump adviser.
At the gathering, Trump told industry executives that their best shot at a rewrite of climate policies that inhibit fossil fuel production would be to raise $1 billion to help propel him back into office.
Trump has repeatedly called oil executives in the months after the dinner, to hear their wishes and raise campaign cash, according to an executive familiar with the calls. At the dinner at Mar-a-Lago, executives raised concerns with Trump — some of which are in the AXPC document — but did not present him with any draft executive orders or written plans, according to an attendee.
At a donor roundtable in Houston in the summer, according to a person who was in attendance, oil executives told Trump that he needed to push for the IEA to replace its leader with one who would be less focused on climate change and more supportive of fossil fuel development.
AXPC says its road map is still in development and will be given to the next president.
Trump “promised to grant their wishes,” said David Doniger, senior adviser to the NRDC Action Fund, the political arm of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the large environmental advocacy group. “And this is their wish list,” he said of the AXPC policy road map, which he reviewed at the request of The Post.
Bednar countered that “our board documents make clear that our priorities are the same regardless of who is in the White House.”
The Trump campaign responded to a request for comment with a statement accusing Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, of being “controlled by environmental extremists.” The statement did not address the AXPC agenda.
Among the AXPC members that have pledged to align with the Paris agreement are ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Hess. The trade group’s members, which also include several smaller companies, account for roughly half of the oil and gas produced in the United States. AXPC has not expressed support for the Paris accord.
ExxonMobil officials sought to distance themselves from the AXPC documents, saying the company does not agree with all of the plans being pursued by the group.
“We are aligned with them on many issues, but there are some issues where we are not,” said Bart Cahir, a senior vice president at ExxonMobil. He said ExxonMobil supports the methane fee.
“We think there needs to be an accountability mechanism within the regulations,” Cahir said. He said that ExxonMobil has cut its methane emissions deeply and that its engagement with AXPC has helped move other companies in that direction.
The confidential AXPC survey on methane emissions showed that while half the members that responded reduced methane flaring from 2021 to 2023, the rest went in the other direction. Flaring is the burning of excess natural gas, which contains methane, during fracking and oil production. Some companies more than doubled the amount of gas they flared, relative to production volumes. The survey results, which did not identify specific companies, showed that the volume of gas flared by AXPC members overall was up 20 percent from 2022 to 2023.
ConocoPhillips and Hess did not respond to requests for comment.
ConocoPhillips corporate filings report “some misalignments” with AXPC on the Paris agreement but note that the company is “aligned” with the group on methane. Hess reports it is “mostly aligned” with AXPC.
“Although AXPC has not directly and publicly supported the aim of the Paris Agreement,” Hess writes in the disclosure, “it has established public principles that demonstrate thoughtful consideration of these issues and a willingness to work with all stakeholders.”
In the road map, AXPC lays out different scenarios depending on which party controls the White House and the two chambers of Congress.
Although leaders of AXPC member companies include Trump donors and fundraisers, the organization itself has not donated to the former president.
Outlined in the documents is more than a half-million dollars in political spending by AXPC to support Republicans in U.S. Senate races in Montana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, which could help push the chamber to GOP control. A small share of AXPC’s political spending goes to Democrats, mostly House members in oil- and gas-producing swing districts.
Under the AXPC plan, executive orders central to the Biden administration’s climate effort would be revoked or rewritten. One, titled “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” is an expansive initiative that reoriented the entire federal government toward confronting climate change, including making the nation’s power grid carbon emissions-free by 2035, eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels, and limiting drilling on federal land.
Another of President Joe Biden’s executive order targeted by AXPC calls on companies to disclose climate-related financial risks. It could require oil and gas companies to be more transparent about their role in driving warming. AXPC is also fighting a Securities and Exchange Commission rule to force such disclosure.
Under the group’s plans, Biden climate measures would be replaced by new executive orders that promote fossil fuel production and lift a federal pause on the construction of massive infrastructure to export liquefied natural gas. Federal rules that require climate considerations to be taken into account for major infrastructure projects would be rewritten. That includes eliminating the Public Lands Rule, which reshuffled priorities involving federal land away from drilling and toward landscape and habitat protection.
“They want to take climate out of the policy process entirely,” said Paasha Mahdavi, director of the Energy Governance and Political Economy Lab at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who also reviewed the plans at the request of The Post. “They want government to stop regulating climate issues and stop thinking about climate risks.”
Mahdavi said AXPC’s road map directly contradicts the climate pledges some of its biggest members are making publicly.
“They talk a lot about climate ambitions while doing something different inside their companies,” he said. “If you are aligned with the Paris agreement, you cannot be part of a trade association trying to roll back these emissions regulations. Those two things are inconsistent.”
The United States was a key architect of the Paris agreement. Trump withdrew U.S. support for it while in office, but the United States recommitted to it after Biden was elected. Most of the major oil and gas companies publicly welcomed the United States rejoining the global agreement.
ExxonMobil said at the time that “the long-term nature of the climate change challenge requires that we all work together, and we look forward to working with the new Administration to put the U.S. on a path of achieving the goals of Paris.”
ConocoPhillips says on its website that it accepts the scientific findings underpinning the Paris agreement, which it calls “a welcomed global policy response” to climate change. A Hess climate disclosure starts with the company’s support of the Paris agreement’s goals.
Independent monitoring groups say the companies are not living up to their pledges. The think tank Carbon Tracker published a report card in March that found all the major oil and gas companies were far off track in meeting the Paris targets. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips received among the worst grades. Hess was not included in the report.
Correction:
A previous version of this article incorrectly used the term methane emissions to describe the practice of burning natural gas during oil and gas production, known as flaring. Flaring is one of multiple industry processes that creates emissions of carbon dioxide as well as methane. The article has been corrected.
By Evan Halper Evan Halper is a business reporter for The Washington Post, covering the energy transition. His work focuses on the tensions between energy demands and decarbonizing the economy. He came to The Post from the Los Angeles Times, where he spent two decades, most recently covering domestic policy and presidential politics from its Washington bureau. Follow on X @evanhalper
By Josh Dawsey Josh Dawsey is a political enterprise and investigations reporter for The Washington Post. He joined the paper in 2017 and previously covered the White House. Before that, he covered the White House for Politico, and New York City Hall and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for the Wall Street Journal. Follow on X @jdawsey1
Related:
Here are more “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Tuesday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)