Trump’s Fossil Fuel Push Meets a Legal Reality Check

Felicity Bradstock

Felicity Bradstock is a freelance writer specialising in Energy and Finance. She has a Master’s in International Development from the University of Birmingham, UK.

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• A judge ruled the Department of Energy broke federal law by using a handpicked climate panel that rejected mainstream science.
• The disputed report was used to justify rolling back cornerstone U.S. climate regulations, including limits on emissions.
• Despite the ruling, the Trump administration is expected to keep using the report as it prioritizes oil, gas, and coal over clean energy.

United States President Donald Trump pursued an electoral campaign that focused on fossil fuel expansion and the reining in of renewable energy projects. Trump has regularly dismissed climate science as fearmongering, suggesting that the U.S. does not need to expand its green energy and cleantech sectors; rather, the country should focus on pumping more oil and gas to boost energy security. However, a recent assessment suggests that Trump may have been misinformed when setting the U.S. energy agenda.

On 30th January, a federal judge ruled that the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) broke the law when Energy Secretary Chris Wright handpicked five researchers who reject the scientific consensus on climate change to write a report on global warming to inform national policy. The Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972 states that agencies are not permitted to recruit or rely on secret groups for policymaking.

The DoE issued the report, which rejected the urgency of addressing global warming, in July, without holding any public meetings. The report was later used by the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, Lee Zeldin, to justify plans to rescind the endangerment finding. The finding, which was established by the Obama administration in 2009, declared carbon dioxide a public danger, giving the agency the legal basis to cap greenhouse gas emissions from major sources such as coal power plants and cars.

Judge William Young said that the DoE did not deny the fact that it had not held open meetings or established a Climate Working Group panel with a range of viewpoints, as the law requires. “These violations are now established as a matter of law,” Young determined in his 4-page decision. He said the Climate Working Group was established as a federal advisory committee to inform policy, and not, as the DoE claimed, merely “assembled to exchange facts or information.”

The Environmental Defence Fund’s senior attorney, Erin Murphy, who brought the lawsuit to the court’s attention, alongside the Union of Concerned Scientists – a national group of about 250 scientists and experts, said that the ruling undermines Trump’s efforts to scrap climate regulations. “It was powerful for the court to issue this order making it clear that this is a legal violation and not how the government should be approaching policy,” Murphy said.

Despite the favourable ruling, no order has been issued for the report to be rescinded. In a statement, the DoE said it was pleased that Judge Young had denied a request to prevent the agency from using the report or keeping it online.

A spokesperson for Secretary Wright, Ben Dietderich, said, “The activists behind this case have long misrepresented not just the actual state of climate science, but also the so-called scientific consensus.” Dietderich added, “They have likewise sought to silence scientists who have merely pointed out — as the Climate Working Group did in its report — that climate science is far from settled.”

In the DoE report, the Climate Working Group stated that carbon dioxide-induced global warming “might be less damaging economically than commonly believed,” and that “aggressive mitigation policies” – such as those designed to reduce the use of fossil fuels – “could prove more detrimental than beneficial.”

Following the publication of the report last July, more than 85 scientists and climate experts denounced the group’s findings in a 459-page document, suggesting that the DoE report was full of errors and misrepresentations. “No one should doubt that human-caused climate change is real, is already producing potentially dangerous impacts, and that humanity is on track for a geologically enormous amount of warming,” the scientists wrote.

In his first year in office, President Trump has repeatedly referred to climate change policy, both in the U.S. and internationally, as a “green new scam”. Trump has also sought to water down the efforts of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the most far-reaching U.S. climate policy to date, as well as halt offshore wind development, and discourage investment in renewables and cleantech. Meanwhile, he has doubled down on efforts to increase oil and gas output, while reinvigorating the country’s coal industry.

In backtracking from the success of a green transition under former President Biden, in favour of fossil fuels, Trump has gone in the opposite direction to much of the rest of the world. As Europe continues to ramp up its renewable energy capacity, wind and solar energy provided more electricity in the European Union than fossil fuels for the first time in 2025. Meanwhile, emerging green energy powers, like the Middle East and Latin America, are making significant progress in reducing their reliance on fossil fuels. 

The recent ruling on the DoE’s climate report demonstrates just how much the Trump administration disregards the scientific consensus on climate change. Even though the judge ruled that the means of developing the report were unlawful, the DoE will keep its report online and is expected to continue using it to shape national policy, which could contribute to higher U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and a larger U.S. contribution to global warming.

By Felicity Bradstock for Oilprice.com

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