By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion
Fungus enthusiasts and fans of the video game/TV show “The Last of Us” will be familiar with cordyceps, an actual parasitic fungus that invades insects and forces them to do its bidding until they die. It’s a great deal for the cordyceps, which uses its hosts to expand its reach. For the insects, not so much.
The takeover of the U.S. government by the fossil-fuel industry during the second Trump administration threatens to do similar harm to its host body.
President Donald Trump’s current government includes 43 former employees of the industry, according to a study by the nonprofit advocacy groups Public Citizen and The Revolving Door Project. They’re joined by a dozen former members of think tanks funded by the industry, several lawyers who have represented it and dozens of former executives with other companies that contribute to greenhouse gases.
These political appointees are mostly clustered in the White House, the Energy and Interior departments and the Environmental Protection Agency, where the bulk of the government’s business related to fossil fuels happens. But they’re also scattered through the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Justice and Transportation. That reflects Trump’s whole-of-government approach to reversing the progress his predecessors made in fighting global heating and transitioning the country toward cleaner energy sources.
It’s not enough that Trump’s government, with help from a servile Congress, is rolling back environmental regulations, clean-energy funding and climate science to benefit oil, gas and coal companies. He’s turned his own White House into a one-stop shop for making sure those companies live a frictionless existence.
“We’re like this little tiger team, concierge, white-glove service, essentially,” for hurrying along fossil-fuel production, Brittany Kelm, senior policy adviser for the White House’s National Energy Dominance Council, recently told “The Lobby Shop” podcast, the Washington Post reported last week. Kelm bragged about needing only four days to get approval for a project that would ordinarily have taken 45.
Kelm, not coincidentally, has worked for Shell Plc, Valero Energy Corp., Noble Energy and other fossil-fuel interests.
During his 2024 campaign, Trump reportedly told oil and gas executives he’d give them whatever they wanted in exchange for $1 billion in donations. In the end, it took only about 10 percent of that $1 billion (plus hundreds of millions more to other candidates and causes during that election) to get white-glove service from the U.S. government; and, as an extra treat, even more generous federal subsidies than they were already getting, worth a cool $35 billion a year, according to the advocacy group Oil Change International.
The companies might not have needed to spend a dime. The blueprint for Trump 2.0 energy policy had been laid out long before the 2024 campaign heated up, in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Much of the damage the administration has since inflicted on climate policy was envisioned in those pages, including exiting the Paris accords, ramping up fossil-fuel production and retracting the EPA finding that greenhouse-gas emissions endanger Americans.
Trump has tried to justify these moves as necessary to establish what he calls “energy dominance,” roughly defined as the ability to produce enough fuel to cheaply power this country and sell energy abroad. In reality, they’re doomed to backfire.
No matter how much Trump tries to ignore it, the demand outlook for fossil fuels is poor. Its decline may be frustratingly slow, given the urgent need to zero out global emissions by 2050 and avoid the worst consequences of global heating. But it’s in long-term decline nevertheless. Green energy recently produced more global electricity than coal for the first time in history in the first half of this year, according to the think tank Ember. That wasn’t a blip.
At a time of booming energy demand, refusing to embrace all forms of energy and favoring only the antiquated ones threatens to leave Americans energy-poor. Meanwhile, China’s rapid green transition may be losing momentum, but the country is still the world’s leading exporter of solar panels, batteries and cheap electric cars. That’s what real energy dominance looks like in the 21st century.
And ignoring global heating as it goes unchecked, as Trump is trying to do, will harm the health and welfare of Americans. The U.S. economy has suffered $6.6 trillion in economic damages from climate-related disasters in the past 12 years, Bloomberg Intelligence has estimated, making it a costlier event over that time period than the Great Depression. U.S. workers lost more than $1 trillion in wages because of wildfire smoke alone between 2020 and 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence has estimated.
These are mere down payments for future damage. Fossil fuels may enjoy shuffling around in this host body now, but we’ll all be sicker and poorer for it.
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
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