In his first two weeks in office, Trump withdrew Biden’s “forever chemical reform plan,” sought to keep lead in Americans’ drinking water, and froze already allocated Inflation Reduction Act funds. Trump has also appointed chemical and oil industry insiders to the EPA, fired every scientist on two of the EPA’s most influential science advisory panels, and seems poised to attempt mass firings of EPA staff. And we just learned that 2024 was the hottest year on record, hotter than the previous record set in 2023.

To make sense of all these changes, we’re joined by Rebecca John. Her reporting has uncovered how Big Oil denied that burning fossil fuel contributed to the climate crisis. She says that this time around the Trump administration is much more organized in its approach to energy and fossil fuels. In response to Trump declaring an “energy emergency,” John says that our energy crisis is the crisis created by the burning of fossil fuels. 

Host Esty Dinur asks John about Big Oil’s dirty history including the industry’s fight against air pollution regulation, the Western States Petroleum Association, and the Los Angeles smog crisis. They also discuss how Trump greenlighted drilling off US coasts and in the Arctic Refuge and the US’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. 

Rebecca John is a research fellow at the Climate Investigations Center and a freelance investigative climate reporter. Her work has been published by DeSmog, Air Mail, and UnHerd; and featured in the Guardian and NPR. Before working on climate, Rebecca was an award-winning documentary film-maker and has produced films for PBS and the BBC.

Remix of CO2 emissions graph (CC BY-SA 4.0) and a fossil fuel plant (CC BY 3.0).

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