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: Early Trump Victory for Fossil Fuel Companies
Dear Diary. As expected, Trump and his fossil fuel interest cronies are beginning to chip away at any climate change related safeguards put into place by the Biden and Obama administrations. Trump is seeing some easy victories, so this is why I think that staying below +2.0°C of preindustrial average global temperatures is a near impossibility.
This is not to write that we should stop fighting for a livable climate, which might be attained should averages go slightly above +2.0°C then slowly go down if sharp fossil fuel reductions occur before 2050. But what we are seeing these days is very discouraging.
Here are more details from the Washington Post:
SEC rule suspension is early gift for Trump’s oil and gas supporters
The acting SEC chair suspends the agency’s fight for climate disclosures.
Published 2/17/2025
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright was chairman and CEO of Liberty Energy before he became a Cabinet member. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
President Donald Trump’s energy secretary and two of his major donors won a key victory last week when the Securities and Exchange Commission moved to back off a rule requiring large companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and any plans to reduce them.
The rule has been a primary target of fossil fuel companies since its approval by the agency under the Biden administration nearly a year ago, and three companies — led by Energy Secretary Chris Wright and donors Harold Hamm and Kelcy Warren —have been at the forefront of the opposition.
Hamm’s Continental Resources, one of the largest oil producers in the Bakken shale, has likened it to “hostile energy public policy.” Warren’s Energy Transfer, a massive pipelinecompany, filed legal objections. And Wright’s Liberty Energy, an oil field services firm,filed suit in federal court to overturn the rule just days after it was issued, calling it a “thinly veiled attempt to inject the SEC into the world of climate politics.”
The move to back off the rule, which has yet to be implemented because of pending lawsuits, represents one of the most immediate victories delivered by the Trump administration to the three men and other fossil fuel companies.
In announcing the decision, SEC acting chair Mark T. Uyeda called the requirement “deeply flawed,” warning it “could inflict significant harm on the capital markets and our economy.” He also echoed others who have said the SEC is not authorized to require such disclosures.
Hamm and Warren and their companies did not respond to requests for comment. Liberty Energy declined to comment on the measure because the litigation is ongoing.
Let’s make a deal
During last year’s presidential race, Trump courted the oil and gas industry and asked its executives to come up with $1 billion for his campaign. Giving such a sum would be a “deal,” Trump told them at an April 2024 meeting at Mar-a-Lago, because of his stands on taxes and regulation.
Hamm, the billionaire founder of Continental Resources, immediately started calling other oil executives, encouraging them to attend fundraisers and donate, The Washington Post reported at the time. A month later, Warren, the billionaire behind Energy Transfer, co-hosted a fundraiser in Houston, where attendance cost $250,000 per person. By that time, Warren had donated at least $800,000 to the Trump campaign.
Meanwhile, Wright donated more than $273,000 to pro-Trump super PACs and the Republican National Committee, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Wright and his wife also co-hosted an August fundraiser for Trump at a golf and ski resort in Big Sky, Montana. After Trump’s election, Hamm backed Wright for energy secretary. Trump nominated him shortly afterward.
The SEC’s retreat from the disclosure rule, coming weeks after Trump’s inauguration, is among the first of many victories expected by oil and gas industry executives. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order, titled “Unleashing American Energy,” which declared a national policy to encourage energy exploration and production on federal lands and waters, including on the Outer Continental Shelf.
He then appointed former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, a noted industry ally, as interior secretary, and Kathleen Sgamma, president of a gas industry trade group called the Western Energy Alliance, to lead the department’s Bureau of Land Management, the agency that manages millions of acres of public lands and waters.
“The mineral wealth of the U.S. government is tremendous, but you have to develop that,” Hamm said after the election in an interview with trade publication Hart Energy. “Certainly, Trump will do that. Our economy needs it, federal government needs it.”
Question of scrutiny
The disclosure rule — which the agency approved by a 3-2 vote last March after two years of discussion — would have made greenhouse gas emissions part of an SEC filing, subjecting companies to rigorous review by their own auditors and the SEC, said Alex Martin, climate finance policy director for Americans for Financial Reform.
An array of public interest groups have defended the SEC rule, arguing that it would help prevent companies from misleading investors and consumers about the risks they face from climate change and their role in emitting greenhouse gases.
“Currently … these corporate sustainability reports typically make the company look really good,” Martin said. With the rule, “there is a much higher level of scrutiny.”
Uyeda is “doing Trump’s bidding,” said Clara Vondrich, senior policy counsel with Public Citizen’s Climate Program. “Climate-related risk is among the most significant financial risks raining down on our economy now … Simply ignoring the risk won’t make it go away for investors, nor for the economy and our financial system.”
After the initial rule was proposed in 2022, some of the largest institutional investors signaled their general approval while successfully nudging the SEC to narrow its scope.
“We firmly believe that climate risk is investment risk,” BlackRock, the large asset management firm, wrote in a filing. “[W]e also write to express our strong support for the Commission’s goal of implementing a framework for public issuers to provide investors with more comparable and consistent climate-related disclosures.”
The Vanguard Group, the large investment adviser, also weighed in favor.
“This information will help investors better understand a company’s exposure to, and management of, climate risk without imposing undue burden on companies,” its filing said.
In an objection filed with the SEC, Warren’s Energy Transfer said it understands management of emissions “is increasingly a topic of interest for some investors, [but] the Proposed Rule requires the disclosure of significant detailed information that will be of little practical use to the average investor.”
“It appears that the underlying impetus behind the reporting … is to ensure that companies are ‘transitioning’ away from fossil fuel energy sources in favor of renewable sources,” the objection continued.
While the move by Uyeda technically only puts a pause on the court fight over the rule, imminent changes at the SEC suggest the long-discussed requirement is unlikely to be implemented any time soon. The incoming SEC chair, Paul Atkins, has also expressed his opposition to it.
“This is a clear sign they are preparing to retreat from the rule,” Martin said.
By Peter Whoriskey Peter Whoriskey is a staff writer for The Washington Post whose work focuses on corporate accountability and the economy. follow on X@PeterWhoriskey
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.)