Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
A top energy adviser to President Donald Trump admitted in an August interview that the administration is offering “concierge, white-glove service” to fossil fuel companies while blocking and defunding clean energy projects, Stephen Prager noted at Common Dreams (10/8).
The comments, reported Oct. 7 by the Washington Post, came from Brittany Kelm, a senior policy adviser for Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council (NEDC), which was established within the Department of the Interior in February.
“We’re like this little tiger team, concierge, white-glove service, essentially,” Kelm said on the Lobby Shop podcast, “We were put together very particularly with the president’s priorities in mind on energy. So keeping coal plants open, establishing critical mineral mining domestically, and then that broader supply chain.”
She described her role in the council as being to help oil, gas, and coal companies navigate “the politicals” of agencies that grant permits for new projects. Companies, she said, “can walk out of our office, and they have all the contacts they need” for regulators in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the departments of the Interior and Commerce.
“We know how to unstick what is stuck,” Kelm said. “It’s a lot of undoing old policies and getting rid of regulatory burdens.”
Mahyar Sorour, the director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Fossil Fuels policy project, responded: “The reality of fossil fuel companies getting white-glove, concierge service from the Trump administration would be comical if it weren’t so sinister.”
“During the election,” she continued, “Trump told oil and gas executives that he would clear the way for more production without any safeguards if they gave his campaign a billion dollars—they did, and now Trump is blocking clean energy and giving the oil and gas industry immense handouts in return.”
Since retaking office in January, Trump has sought to expand the production of oil, gas, and coal with reckless abandon, without regard to the impacts of carbon emissions on the planet or other environmental impacts of pollution.
As the rest of the world has surged its use of wind and solar projects, surpassing coal for the first time this year, the Department of Energy made a $625 million investment to “expand and reinvigorate the coal industry,” which is the dirtiest form of energy.
And July’s massive GOP budget contained billions of dollars worth of handouts for the fossil fuel industry, boosted drilling on millions of acres of public lands, mandated oil and gas lease sales, and imposed new fees on renewable development.
At the same time, Trump has singlehandedly reduced the US’s growth outlook for renewables by 45%, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
As the Post reports:
[Trump’s] administration has held up permits for solar and wind projects since July and blocked wind farms outright. The Energy Department last week canceled $7.6 billion in funding for projects aimed at curbing climate change including installation of renewables, grid upgrades and carbon capture projects. That’s on top of $27 billion in funding for clean energy that the Environmental Protection Agency is seeking to claw back.
