The week just passed was a rough one for California Governor Gavin Newsom. Early in the week, Newsom’s complete lack of leadership in his home state combined with a similar dereliction of duty by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass to justify President Donald Trump’s move to activate both the National Guard and 700 U.S. Marines to move into downtown Los Angeles to control escalating riots there.
As if that weren’t humiliating enough, President Trump held a White House ceremony Thursday during which he signed a series of three resolutions passed under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) designed to kill California’s electric vehicle (EV) mandate which has been a centerpiece of Newsom’s regulatory policies.
“Under the previous administration, the federal government gave left-wing radicals in California dictatorial powers to control the future of the entire car industry all over the country,” Trump said in remarks preceding the signing. “It’s been a disaster for this country.”
In response, Newsom said in a statement, “The weaponization of the Congressional Review Act to attack California’s waivers is just another part of the continuous, partisan campaign against California’s efforts to protect the public and the planet from harmful pollution.” It’s pretty weak sauce, but it’s all he has at this point.
Well, except for another round of lawfare, that is. Within minutes of Trump’s affixing his signature (no autopen involved) to the resolutions, California Attorney General Rob Bonta had filed a lawsuit challenging the resolutions in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Bonta was joined by Democrat attorneys general from 10 other states.
KCRA Channel 3 TV in Sacramento pointed out that this suit is the 26th time Bonta has sued the Trump administration since January. Bonta admitted during his press conference that his office has already spent $5 million in pursuing its Trump-focused lawfare agenda, but no worries: The state assembly recently authorized a $25 million boost to Bonta’s budget to continue his Quixotic strategy.
repeal a waiver under the clean air act issued by the Biden EPA in 2023 which allows California to mandate all new cars sold by 2035 be what the California Air Resources Board (CARB) classifies as “zero emissions vehicles,” or ZEVs;
block rules requiring zero-emission sales targets for commercial trucks; and
eliminate higher standards for heavy-duty diesel engines to reduce smog-forming nitrogen oxide pollution.
The central claim in Bonta’s lawsuit is that Congress’s use of the CRA to revoke California’s Clean Air Act waivers is unprecedented and illegal. Enacted in 1996, the CRA gives congress authority to revoke regulations that are finalized by an outgoing administration. Passed on a bipartisan vote of congress, it is designed to limit the exact sort of effort witnessed in the final months of the Biden administration to shove through as many new regulations as possible before leaving office.
CRA actions are exempt from the Senate filibuster and not subject to judicial review. However, because the CRA has rarely been invoked since it became law, it has never previously been used to rescind a waiver issued by EPA or any other federal regulator. Bonta is banking on the federal courts being willing to intervene based on an argument that the issuance of a waiver does not constitute a regulatory action. While what we’ve seen over the last five months indicates a likelihood that Bonta and his fellow plaintiffs will be able to shop for a district court judge who will be willing to issue a temporary injunction, their prospects of prevailing at the appellate level or the U.S. Supreme Court seem dim.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who authored one of the resolutions, frames the issue as a defense of consumer choice, telling Politico, “These mandates force Americans into vehicles they don’t want or can’t afford, all while ignoring the realities of our grid and supply chains.” The reality is that few Americans really want to buy EVs, which is the motivator for Newsom’s attempt to force them.
It’s all bad news for Gov. Newsom, who has been relegated to a complaining bystander in his own state as others act to address problems of his own creation. That’s no way to run a state, Governor.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Australia-based energy firm Woodside announced Monday plans to invest $17 billion in a new liquefied natural gas export facility to be sited in south Louisiana. Company CEO and Managing Director Meg O’Neill said the Louisiana LNG facility represents the single largest greenfield energy project investment, and the largest foreign direct investment in the state’s history.
In a release, the company said the project will support 15,000 jobs during the construction phase and, when completed, will sport a total export capacity of more than 27 million tons per annum of LNG. Originally named the Driftwood LNG project by previous owner Tellurian, Woodside acquired the project in 2024 for just $900 million.
The timing of Woodside’s announcement on Monday, which represented the 99th day of President Donald Trump’s second administration, serves to symbolize the impressive success the President and his senior appointees have had in completely changing the energy and climate policy debate in the U.S. across their first 100 days. Nowhere has this sea change in policy been more obvious than as it relates to the LNG export industry.
When Trump was sworn into office on January 20, America’s LNG sector had spent the previous 358 days as a target of demonization by former President Joe Biden and his senior officials. That stemmed from the decision by the White House to implement a so-called “pause” in permitting of new LNG facilities like Louisiana LNG on January 27 last year. Prior to last November’s election, that pause appeared destined to become a permanent feature of federal policy had Kamala Harris won the presidency.
President Trump canceled the Biden pause with a Day 1 executive order, and the industry has since resumed the pace of rapid expansion that had made it one of America’s great growth industries prior to Biden’s irrational move last year.
The resumption of the LNG industry’s rapid growth path is just one of many success stories which Trump’s energy team of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin can point to at the end of this first 100 days time period.
At Interior, Secretary Burgum can point to his efforts to return the federal oil and gas leasing program to normal order both onshore and offshore after four years of its being held hostage by Biden’s Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. He can also highlight last week’s announcement detailing efforts to speed up permitting approvals related requirements under the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act.
Zeldin is able to point to his effort to freeze $20 billion in highly questionable grants awarded by his predecessor, Michael Regan, during the final days of the Biden presidency, and claw them back a major savings. He has also embarked on a study focused on the potential reversal of the Obama EPA’s endangerment finding on greenhouse gases, a finding that classifies carbon dioxide, the fundamental building block for all life on Planet Earth, as a pollutant which can be regulated under the Clean Air Act. A successful reversal of that finding could lead to the restoration of honesty in air quality regulation and a focus on elimination of real pollution, which was the intent of the law as it was passed by congress.
Secretary Wright has less ability to directly impact regulatory polices to the nature of his job, but he has become the most effective spokesman for commonsense energy policies to ever hold the Energy Secretary position. He has not shied away from taking on controversial topics, like the need to revitalize the nation’s coal industry to take advantage of America’s enormous wealth of that resource. Wright has also been very blunt and effective in highlighting the role the wind industry has played in forcing consumer utility costs up to all-time highs under the Biden administration.
Taken as a whole, it is hard to imagine a more impactful 100 days related to energy and climate policy than this administration has achieved. Trump’s legion of critics won’t agree with the direction he and his appointees have taken, but they can’t honestly claim they aren’t producing major results. For Trump and his team, it is a simple case of promises made, promises kept.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
News broke last week that the Biden Department of Energy (DOE), led by former Secretary Jennifer Granholm, was so dedicated to the Biden White House’s efforts to damage the dynamic U.S. LNG export industry that it resorted to covering up a 2023 DOE study which found that growth in exports provide net benefits to the environment and economy.
“The Energy Department has learned that former Secretary Granholm and the Biden White House intentionally buried a lot of data and released a skewed study to discredit the benefits of American LNG,” one DOE source told Nick Pope of the Daily Caller News Foundation.. “[T]he administration intentionally deceived the American public to advance an agenda that harmed American energy security, the environment and American lives.”
And “deceived” is the best word to describe what happened here. When the White House issued an order signed by the administration’s very busy autopen to invoke what was supposed to be a temporary “pause” in permitting of LNG infrastructure, it was done at the behest of far-left climate czar John Podesta, with Granholm’s full buy-in. As I’ve cataloged here in past stories, this cynical “pause” was based on the flimsiest possible rationale, and the “science” supposedly underlying it was easily debunked and fell completely apart over time.
But the ploy moved ahead anyway, with Granholm and her DOE staff ordered to conduct their own study related to the advisability of allowing further growth of the domestic LNG industry. We know now that study already existed but hadn’t reached the hoped-for conclusions.
The two unfounded fears at hand were concerns that rising exports of U.S. LNG would a) cause domestic prices to rise for consumers, and b) would result in higher emissions than alternative energy sources. As the Wall Street Journal notes, a draft of that 2023 study “shows that increased U.S. LNG exports would have negligible effects on domestic prices while modestly reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. The latter is largely because U.S. LNG exports would displace coal in power production and gas exports from other countries such as Russia.”
An energy secretary and climate advisor interested in seeking truth based on science would have made that 2023 study public, and the “pause” would have been a short-lived, temporary thing. Instead, the Biden officials decided to try to bury this inconvenient truth, causing the “pause” to endure right through the final day of the Biden regime with a clear intention of turning it into permanent policy had Kamala Harris and her “summer of joy” campaign managed to prevail on Nov. 5.
Fortunately for the country, voters chose more wisely, and President Trump included ending this deceitful “pause” exercise as part of his Day One agenda. No autopen was involved.
So, the thing is resolved in favor of truth and common sense now, but it is important to understand exactly what was at stake here, exactly how important an industry these Biden officials were trying to freeze in place.
In an interview on Fox News Monday, current Energy Secretary Chris Wright did just that, pointing out that, fifteen years ago, America was “the largest importer of natural gas in the world. Today, we’re the largest exporter.”
He went onto add that, “the Biden administration put a pause on LNG exports 14 months ago, January of 2024, sending a message to the world that maybe the US isn’t going to continue to grow our exports. Think of the extra leverage that gives Russia, the extra fear that gives the Europeans or the Asians that are dying for more American energy.”
Then, Wright supplied the kicker: “They did this in spite of their own study that showed increasing LNG exports would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and have a negligible impact on price.” It was an effort, Wright concludes, to kill what he says is “America’s greatest energy advantage.”
This incident is a stain on the Biden administration and its senior leaders. The stain becomes more indelible when we remember that, when asked by Speaker Mike Johnson why he had signed that order, Joe Biden himself had no memory of doing so, telling Johnson, “I didn’t do that.”
Sadly, we know now there’s a good chance Mr. Biden was telling the speaker the truth. But someone did it, and it’s a travesty.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
During a 12-minute video appearance at the 2025 Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) Conference held in London, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright told the audience that “Net zero by 2050 “is a sinister goal.”
That is a bold statement, especially given that it was delivered to an audience sitting in the United Kingdom, where both major political parties that have traditionally governed the country – the Conservative “Tories” and the far-left Labour Party – have spent the past decade pushing their country to meet its net zero goals as if it were a matter of religious faith. Regardless of the obvious negative economic and social consequences that have been heaped upon UK citizens, and equally obvious futility of the entire effort, leaders of both parties have kept the country on this ruinous path.
As Wright went on to point out, net zero by 2050 is “both unachievable by any practical means, but the aggressive pursuit of it…has not delivered any benefits, but it’s delivered tremendous costs.” This is objectively true, the most painful example being the rapid deindustrialization of the formerly strong British economy and the accompanying rapacious condemnation of thousands of acres of arable lands to become home to huge wind and solar installations.
As Wright points out, “no one’s going to make an energy-intensive product in the United Kingdom anymore.” A clear object lesson in that reality came in September when venerable steelmaker Tata Steel shut down the last existing steelmaking plant in the UK.
Climate zealots in both major parties celebrated that event, but we must ask what there really is to celebrate? Sure, the Labour politicos get to virtue signal about the elimination of X tons of carbon dioxide emissions, but in a global sense, that’s meaningless. The UK still needs steel – the only difference now is that the steel that used to be made by highly-paid workers in domestic mills will now be imported steel made by poverty waged workers in Pakistan, China and other mainly Asian countries.
Meanwhile, the emissions created by making the steel in those other countries with lower environmental regulations will be far larger than from steel that used to be made in the UK. As Wright pointed out at the ARC conference, “This is not energy transition. This is lunacy.”
He isn’t wrong.
On Feb. 13, the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) published a report showing that construction of new coal-fired power plants in China reached a ten-year high in 2024. CREA finds that “China approved 66.7 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity in 2024, with approvals picking up in the second half after a slower start to the year.” It all belies the favored narrative on the political left that China is leading the world in converting its power systems to renewables. In reality, the expansion of its coal sector may actually be accelerating again.
That renewed Chinese focus on expanding its coal power fleet is driven in large part by the zealous focus by globalist leaders in the UK and other western countries – Germany is another great example – on deindustrializing their own economies to satisfy their obsession over atmospheric plant food.
The making of steel and other heavy industrial processes requires reliable, affordable power generation that runs 24 hours every day, 7 days every week. Whether politicians like it or not, coal is the fuel that most reliably and consistently meets all those tests.
Thus, if China and other Asian nations are destined to inherit all the heavy industries being killed off by virtue signaling Western nations, they will need many more coal power plants to power them. This really isn’t complicated.
Meanwhile, the UK can no longer manufacture its own steel or myriad other industrial products that are essential to modern human existence. If the Labour government continues its policy of condemning vast swaths of British farmland to house more and more wind and solar sites, the kingdom will soon no longer be able to even feed its people.
All to satisfy this odd religious dogma based on an obsession over plant food. Lunacy, indeed.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Things are just not going well for the leftwing activist groups, billionaire-funded NGOs and trial lawyer firms who have recruited a growing number of state and local government entities to sue U.S. oil and gas companies involving specious claims for damages caused by climate change. In recent months, the lawfare campaign, coordinated mainly from the offices of one San Francisco-based firm, has suffered a series of adverse judicial decisions in what appears to be a rising consensus in the nation’s courts.
Just two weeks after suffering a major setback in a decision involving Anne Arundel County, Maryland, the pushers and funders of this lawfare campaign were tossed out in a case targeting ExxonMobil, Chevron and additional defendants in New Jersey. There, Superior Court Judge Douglas H. Hurd dismissed the Garden State’s lawsuit with prejudice based on the same federal primacy arguments which prevailed in recent decisions in New York City and Baltimore, as well as in the Anne Arundel case.
In seeking damages, New Jersey adopted similar tactics adopted in the other cases that make up this lawfare campaign, claiming they’ve been harmed by “climate change” impacts allegedly caused by the emissions by oil companies, but attempting to couch the damages as violations of state laws unrelated to air pollution. But Hurd was having none of it.
“Despite the artful pleading by the Plaintiffs in this case,” the judge says in his decision, “this court finds that Plaintiffs’ complaint, even under the most indulgent reading, is entirely about addressing the injuries of global climate change and seeking damages for such alleged injuries.”
The problem for the states, cities and counties who have signed up for this lawfare campaign in the hopes of grabbing some big bucks from Big Oil is that their arguments inevitably amount to a local effort to de facto regulate air quality, an area of regulation in which the federal government has always asserted its primacy. There’s a very good reason for this: If every city, county and state in America were allowed to regulate air quality, the economy would soon grind to a halt as it becomes impossible to do business in this country.
Like the judges in the other cases decided thus far, Hurd conceded to that reality in dismissing the New Jersey case, saying, “As Defendants state in their moving brief, ‘the federal system does not permit a State to apply its laws to claims seeking redress for injuries allegedly caused by interstate or worldwide emissions,’” adding, “In conclusion, only federal law can govern Plaintiffs’ interstate and international emissions claims because ‘the basic scheme of the Constitution so demands.’”
The decision in the New Jersey case no doubt comes as a real disappointment for the billionaire-funded foundations and NGOs who spent years pushing for the state attorney general’s office to bring a case. In 2023, Energy Policy Advocates obtained emails detailing tactics employed by the Rockefeller-funded Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) to convince various cities and counties in the state to sign onto the lawfare campaign.
Those emails revealed close coordination between CCI and New Jersey officials, even to the extent of CCI funding an “Accountability University” to educate lawfare participants about the best tactics and talking points to deploy in their big money grab efforts.
CCI even offered to “ghost write” opinion pieces for public officials and “serve as an extra set of hands,” adding, “…there are absolutely no legal obligations. Since we are a 501 c3, there is no pledge or legal sign on’ required. Rather, we view ourselves as an extra set of hands to help public officials…”
So, what’s the point of all this, you might ask? Well, the point is that when you see one of these lawsuits brought by a city, county or state government, just know that none of this is happening organically. Also know that this big money grab costs these companies millions to defend themselves, and we all end up paying for it at the gas pump and in our home utility bills. Maybe it’s time we all demand these billionaires and trial lawyers find more productive ways to spend their time and money.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
