But look closer, as we did, and you’ll find something else: a shadowy nonprofit that has been key to Donald Trump’s ongoing assault on climate and environmental policy, including last month’s reversal of the endangerment finding—aka “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”

The nonprofit, the Center for Environmental Accountability, has no physical office space; its only known address is a rented mailbox in a nondescript, third-party shipping store nestled between the nail salon and a vacant storefront in the Mayflower plaza. That is, to put it mildly, a curious home for a group that claims, as CEA does, to champion “transparency and accountability in environmental and energy policy.”

Then again, it’s also a fitting one for a group that passes dark money from deep-pocketed conservative orgs to well-connected oil & gas lawyers, and then passes the work of those same attorneys off as its own to the government—all while taking steps to obscure its ties to nearly every corner of the climate-denial movement, as CEA does as well.

It is difficult to say, exactly, how large of a role CEA as an entity played in last month’s endangerment reversal—in part because CEA seems to want it that way. The group’s founding president apparently hung up on the Politico reporter who first reported on our investigation. CEA’s second president (politely) declined to speak with Fieldnotes. And the group’s last known principal did not respond to our emailed list of questions.

But this much is clear: Many of the lawyers who worked with, for, or alongside CEA before rejoining the current Trump administration last year were directly involved in the reversal, including U.S. EPA’s David Fotouhi and Aaron Szabo, DOE’s Jonathan Brightbill, CEQ’s Justin Schwab, and DOJ’s Marc Marie. And importantly, those same CEA-affiliated lawyers spent the Biden administration simultaneously representing oil, gas, and petrochemical interests via their outside work for specific companies, trade lobbies, and/or special interest groups.

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You can find our full investigation into CEA here and Politico’s story building off of it here ($). It completes something of a Fieldnotes investigative trilogy aimed at answering the question: Who, exactly, killed the endangerment finding?

Part I was last month’s New York Times story, based partly on confidential documents we obtained, that revealed how four MAGA activists dragged the endangerment repeal across the finish line, even after the oil & gas industry pumped the brakes. (Among them, not incidentally, was Jonathan Brightbill, one of CEA’s founding board members.)

Part II was Julia Kane’s and my collab with HEATED explaining why the American Petroleum Institute, which for years had led the charge to repeal the finding, took its foot off the metaphorical gas—specifically, out of a genuine fear that the end of endangerment will, somewhat counterintuitively, make it far more difficult for the oil & gas corporations API represents to continue to avoid paying for the climate damages they’ve wrought.

Part III was our CEA investigation, first reported on exclusively by Politico, which makes plain that regardless of who delivered the actual endangerment death blow, it almost certainly wouldn’t have happened without the legal infrastructure that the fossil fuel industry created and continues to fund today.

And while the MAGA culture warriors and the oil & gas companies weren’t marching in lockstep on this particular issue, there’s already evidence to suggest any daylight between them was short lived. Both are already coming together to try to shield corporations from the very climate lawsuits and state superfund laws that industry is so afraid of in a post-endangerment world.

Put another way, then, any dissonance between industry and the ideologues that emerged during the final push to kill endangerment doesn’t change how we got here; it simply points to where oil & gas companies and their far-right allies want to go next.

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Energy Transfer, the pipeline company behind the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, has deployed a decade-old astroturf group it secretly funds in a bid to stop Greenpeace from suing it in Europe for intimidation, a Fieldnotes investigation in partnership with Drilled has found.

Grow America’s Infrastructure Now, or GAIN, as the group is known, presents itself as a “broad coalition of businesses, trade associations, and labor groups.” In reality, it is a second-generation front covertly funded by Energy Transfer and run on its behalf by the DCI Group, a powerful Beltway firm specializing in crisis communications and shadow lobbying, according to a review of court documents, business filings, and other public records.

Energy Transfer has used GAIN and a predecessor group known as Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now, or MAIN, to make its case in the court of public opinion since the Standing Rock protests over the company’s controversial Dakota Access Pipeline began in 2016. Now GAIN is coming to Energy Transfer’s defense in the court of law in a case with far-reaching impacts on free speech and protest both in the United States and abroad.

GAIN filed an amicus brief in North Dakota this past month backing the company’s request that the state supreme court block Greenpeace International from countersuing it in the Netherlands. In effect, Energy Transfer indirectly submitted a friend-of-the-court brief on its own behalf in a bid to convince a North Dakota court to intervene in a foreign one.

Greenpeace’s countersuit, the first major test of a new E.U. directive aimed at preventing lawsuits being used to silence critics, is a response to Energy Transfer’s lawsuit against Greenpeace in North Dakota for its role in the pipeline protests; the company won a nine-figure judgement against Greenpeace entities in that case earlier this year. If Greenpeace International is successful in the Dutch court, it could recoup a portion of the several hundred million dollars Energy Transfer was awarded in North Dakota. If it isn’t, it could spell the end of the environmental group’s U.S. operations.

Energy Transfer chairman Kelcy Warren, a Trump megadonor with an estimated net worth of more than $7 billion, has spoken openly about his desire to financially cripple Greenpeace. “What they did to us is wrong and they’re going to pay for it,” he said in a 2017 television interview. When later asked by a reporter if his goal was to “cease funding for organizations like Greenpeace” he responded: “Absolutely.”

Neither Energy Transfer nor DCI Group responded to requests for comment. Both have previously declined to say publicly whether the Beltway firm is working for the Texas pipeline company, instead stressing that the company wasn’t an official “member” of GAIN. However, Energy Transfer vice president Vicki Granado admitted under oath in 2023 that Energy Transfer hired DCI, that DCI launched MAIN on Energy Transfer’s behalf, and that Energy Transfer funded both MAIN and GAIN.

Excerpts of Granado’s deposition were entered into the court record the following year, and first covered in Drilled’s SLAPP’d podcast. Asked whether DCI “set up” MAIN, Granado replied, “Yes.” Asked whether Energy Transfer approved DCI doing so, she replied, “We did.” And asked “who funds GAIN,” the long-time Energy Transfer exec replied, “We do.” Granado estimated then that the company was spending at least $100,000 per month to fund the group.

The existence of GAIN’s amicus brief was first reported by the New York Times.

Hiding in Plain Sight

Energy Transfer has avoided publicly disclosing its connection to MAIN and GAIN. DCI Group, meanwhile, has largely been hiding in plain sight.

Since fall 2016, MAIN and GAIN’s chief spokesperson and public face has been Craig Stevens, a vice president at DCI. The Beltway public affairs shop was founded in the mid-1990s by GOP lobbyists with ties to the tobacco industry and more recently has been linked to an alleged global hacking-for-hire campaign targeting prominent U.S. climate activists critical of Exxon, a long-time DCI client.

Over the past decade, Stevens has in his role as MAIN and GAIN spokesperson been quoted by more than two dozen news outlets, including both national newspapers and local outlets, and taken part in a number of public events—with very few exceptions without a mention of his DCI job and never with a disclosure that Energy Transfer was his client.

In September 2016, for instance, Stevens appeared on an academic panel on the meaning of the pipeline protests alongside scholars and members of the Standing Rock Sioux. Two months later, he penned an op-ed in the Washington Times decrying the role of “fake news” in the decision to deny the pipeline’s permit. In May 2021, he was given a speaking slot on stage at a North Dakota chamber of commerce event alongside the state’s entire U.S. congressional delegation. And in late 2023, he featured prominently in an Energy Transfer-produced video that ran as sponsored content in Fortune. Each time, Stevens was described only as a MAIN or GAIN spokesperson.

The DCI Group has long boasted to potential clients that it has “the deepest and most sophisticated political network in the public affairs industry.”

According to Granado’s sworn deposition, DCI has run MAIN since its launch in 2015. Stevens became the public face of the group when the Standing Rock protests began to draw national attention in fall 2016, according to a review of MAIN press releases.

Stevens issued his first public statement on behalf of MAIN on September 6, 2016, just days before Energy Transfer’s Warren publicly announced plans to more aggressively defend the pipeline in the press. “It has not been my preference to engage in a media/PR battle,” Warren wrote in a memo to employees that was also released to several media outlets. “However, misinformation has dominated the news, so we will work to communicate with the government and media more clearly in the days to come.”

The same day as Warren’s memo, a number of suspicious social media accounts posted pro-pipeline messages on Twitter, several of which cited and linked to MAIN material. “Protesters for #NoDAPL trespassing on private land and picking fights,” wrote one user with a single follower and a profile pic of actress Eva Longoria. “Dumb way to spread a message.” Stevens quickly denied that MAIN was involved. “As far as I know, and [I] think I know, the MAIN Coalition had nothing to do with them,” he told DeSmog, which was first to report on the posts.

After Energy Transfer completed the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2017, MAIN was rebranded as GAIN and expanded its purview beyond the Midwest. According to a federal database of tax-exempt entities, MAIN never registered as a non-profit with the IRS but GAIN did in 2019 as a 501(c)4. According to its filings, the group has no salaried staff, is registered at an address shared by the Delaware offices of a mid-Atlantic law firm, and does not disclose the source of its funding, the vast majority of which, the group claims, has been spent on advertising.

Neither of the two officers listed on GAIN IRS filings appear to be DCI employees, nor are they listed on the front group’s website. But one of the two, the group’s president, is Travis Terranova. Someone with that same name is an insurance agent in western New York who graduated from the same high school as DCI’s Stevens at or around the same time, according to public records and the two men’s social media accounts. Neither Stevens nor Terranova responded to requests for comment on their relationship to one another.

‘Illegitimate Corporate-Funded SLAPP Harassment’

GAIN isn’t the only industry-entity to support Energy Transfer in its bid to convince an American court to influence the European case. The American Energy Association, a trade group whose members include Liberty Energy, a fracking company founded by Energy secretary Chris Wright, also filed an amicus brief on behalf of the pipeline company. So too did the Institute for Energy Research, a “free-market” think tank with ties to Charles Koch that has received funding directly from Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute.

Greenpeace’s Dutch lawsuit is the latest development in a legal battle that began in 2017 when Energy Transfer first sued Greenpeace in federal court alleging it had orchestrated the Standing Rock protests that ended earlier that same year. After a federal judge tossed the case, Energy Transfer refiled a narrower version in North Dakota, one of several states without laws against what are known as SLAPP lawsuits, or strategic litigation against public participation.

Earlier this year, a Mandan, ND, jury ordered Greenpeace entities to pay Energy Transfer nearly $670 million. Last month, the judge who oversaw the case cut the award nearly in half to $345 million, citing technicalities. Greenpeace maintains it played only a supporting role in protests that were largely peaceful, and says it plans to appeal the ND verdict.

A group of lawyers who monitored the trial raised a number of issues after the verdict, including the jury’s extensive ties to the local fossil-fuel industry and the presiding judge’s limited experience in complex First Amendment cases. ”Our fear that this was an illegitimate corporate-funded SLAPP harassment case was confirmed by our observations,” the Trial Monitoring Committee, as the group called itself, said in a statement.

Now, Energy Transfer is attempting to stop Greenpeace’s Dutch countersuit from moving forward. The pipeline company filed an emergency motion in July asking a North Dakota judge to block Greenpeace from proceeding with it. That motion was denied in September but the company then appealed to the state supreme court, where oral arguments are scheduled for December 18, 2025.

If Greenpeace’s ND appeal and Dutch countersuit fail, the environmental group says it would jeopardize the future of its US operations. Others say the impact would be far greater, chilling free speech and protest both in the US and abroad.

“These cases have a dual impact,” Charlie Holt, the European lead for Global Climate Legal Defense, told the Guardian earlier this year. “On the one hand, they have a devastating effect on the individual campaigner, reporter or organisation, but also they have this systemic impact on democracy because they work to block accountability and shut down information about corporations, politicians or other powerful individuals or groups.”

MAGA influencers hired by a firm that promotes “anti-woke” movies. The obscure research group Lee Zeldin was working for when he was picked to lead the U.S. EPA. A “pink-slime” media outlet backed by right-wing billionaires Leonard Leo and Charles Koch.

All feature in a new Guardian investigation published this weekend in partnership with Fieldnotes that reveals a coordinated campaign being waged by major soda and snack-food corporations hoping to pit Donald Trump’s MAGA faithful against RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement. The companies’ immediate goal: to stymie the MAHA-led effort to curb how much ultra-processed food and soda Americans eat and drink.

You can read the full investigation over at the Guardian, which details the network of hired guns the soda and snack industry has turned to for help. But given Fieldnotes is an oil & gas watchdog, you may be wondering why we spent time and effort digging deep into Big Soda and Big Snack. (It wasn’t just because it revealed a sprawling network of for-hire pollsters, strategists, and political money men, though that didn’t hurt.)

The very short answer: Plastics and the petrochemicals they are made from.

Food and beverage manufacturers rely on the former to cheaply package their products; oil & gas companies see the latter as a financial lifeline in a world trying to slowly wean itself off its reliance on fossil fuels for power generation and transportation. The International Energy Agency estimates petrochemicals will become the primary source of global oil demand growth next year—and that the industry will consume one in every six barrels of oil globally by the end of the decade. Single-use-plastic business as usual, then, benefits both the soda and snack companies and the oil & gas industry—people and the planet, not so much.

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that so many of the players involved in the influence campaign we uncovered—the companies funding it, the trade groups leading it, the for-hire operatives carrying it out, even the right-wing ideologues helping in their own, less direct ways—have ties to the oil & gas industry. A few highlights:

• The two trade groups spearheading the effort, the American Beverage Association and the Consumer Brands Association, regularly collaborate with oil, gas, and petrochemical interests. AmBev, for example, is formally allied with the American Chemistry Council, the leading chemical lobby, while CBA proudly boasts ExxonMobil, the largest oil & gas company in the United States, as one of its top supporters and closest allies. Both AmBev and CBA are also members of the Recycling Leadership Council, an industry-led group that champions chemical recycling, an unproven-at-scale technology being pushed by petrochemical and plastics companies despite inherent limitations acknowledged by insiders. (Of note to Fieldnotes completists: AmBev also works closely with a plastic trade group that was the subject of one of our first investigations—the one with a Dennis Quaid cameo.)

• Together, AmBev and CBA represent a wide swath of food and beverage corporations, including: Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft-Heinz, Mondelez, and Nestle, all of which are funders of The Recycling Partnership alongside Exxon, chemical giants like Dow and Eastman, and the Plastics Industry Association. The partnership advocates for states to pass industry-friendly Extended Producer Responsibility legislation that does not address plastic production or use, only waste.

• Tyson Group, the ostensibly independent polling shop where all five of its publicly listed employees also work for a much larger and more prominent GOP operation, has previously worked for the Consumer Energy Association, a fossil-fuel front group that has received funding from major oil & gas trade groups including the American Petroleum Institute and American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers.

• The Center Square, a journalistically dubious “pink slime” media outlet that amplified the soda industry’s talking points, is run by the Franklin Foundation, which has received substantial funding from Donors Trust, Leonard Leo’s primary dark-money vehicle, and is part of the State Policy Network of conservative think tanks backed by Leo and the Koch family. As Fieldnotes has documented, Leo and Koch have funded the right-wing attacks on what is known as ESG, the investing strategy that takes into consideration environmental, social, and governance issues and that poses a threat to fossil fuel companies.

• Public Opinion Strategies, contracted by AmBev to conduct polling it would later use to lobby state officials, has also worked for Alliance Defending Freedom, the right-wing Christian legal group connected to Leo’s attack on ESG investing, as well as a number of oil & gas interests including the American Chemistry Council, the American Petroleum Institute, and ExxonMobil.

There’s also another, less obvious connection to a previous Fieldnotes investigation: Lee Zeldin’s ethics paperwork. This time, it revealed Zeldin briefly led an obscure firm later involved in the soda campaign; last time, it revealed Zeldin was getting paid by both sides of the ESG fight.

Meanwhile, the soda-and-snack lobbying push has occurred as signs of tension continue to emerge within the Trump administration between RFK Jr, who—when not making it more difficult for Americans to get vaccinated—has promised to end corporate influence on public policy, and the far more industry-friendly wing of the administration, where Zeldin and other cabinet officials have stocked their agencies with corporate lobbyists who spent their careers pushing to ease regulations on many of the same industries the Maha movement, including Kennedy, blames for poisoning American children.

Last month, the RFK-led MAHA Commission released its second government report, which focused far less on corporate cronyism than the first and did not propose any new restrictions on ultra-processed foods, disappointing many MAHA proponents. The commission bears the name of the movement, but it also includes Zeldin and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins as members, and other Trump officials like Nancy Beck and Kailee Tkacz Buller were involved in the commission’s work, according to federal records. Beck worked at the American Chemistry Council before her first stint at Trump’s EPA, while Buller represented SNAC International, another major snack-food trade group, and several other ag interests before joining Rollins at USDA.

Head on over to the Guardian to check out the full investigation.

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Documents obtained by Fieldnotes and first reported on by Canary Media this morning offer a vivid illustration of what the industry's money-making plan looks like in action in Ohio—one that begins with passing legislation needed for Donald Trump’s EPA to transfer oversight of CCS projects to state regulators, likely speeding approval and weakening environmental protections.

The documents show API and the Ohio Oil & Gas Association stage-managing that legislative push to a degree that is remarkable even within the world of lobbying. The industry wrote the legislation in question, hand-picked state lawmakers to introduce it, lined up witnesses to testify in support of it, and provided lawmakers with talking points to advocate for it.

The effort didn’t stop there. API and OOGA have also been in regular contact with their chosen lawmakers as the push continues. Records show they have met with the bill’s sponsors in person or on Zoom on at least a dozen separate occasions since late 2023, and exchanged more than a hundred emails with the sponsors’ staff during that time. The lobbying blitz has not been confined to normal work hours or settings, either. This past January, for example, API organized a white tablecloth dinner for one of the sponsors and a handful of executives from its member companies.

You can read the Canary Media report—headlined, “In Ohio, oil and gas industry is steering new carbon capture bill”—and then visit the Fieldnotes site to read our full investigation and view a detailed timeline of API and OOGA’s ongoing behind-the-scenes lobbying blitz.

Kate MacGregor, President Trump's nominee for the No. 2 post at the Interior Department, participated in systematically concealing public records of her meetings during her previous tenure at the agency, according to documents obtained by Fieldnotes. As a key fixer for the fossil fuel industry during Trump's first term, MacGregor's official meeting records were stored in Google Docs that she then failed to preserve—effectively hiding information about her extensive interactions with oil & gas executives, including Trump megadonor and Continental Resources chairman Harold Hamm.

MacGregor was a key player in Trump's first term, rising from Assistant Secretary to Deputy Secretary of the Interior and staying in the agency all four years. Viewed as both competent and capable of keeping out of the limelight, MacGregor was the go-to DOI official for the oil industry. In a closed-door meeting in 2017, oil lobbyists were caught on tape bragging that they knew her "very well" and that if there was a problem, "We'll call Kate." That boast proved prescient when she fast tracked "deficient" permits for a well-connected oil company that same year, as was revealed by Documented and Public Citizen in 2019.

With her confirmation hearing set for April 2, MacGregor is poised to return to the No. 2 position at DOI, where her fans expect her to again wield considerable influence. As Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) told the Trump transition team in November 2024 while recommending MacGregor for the top job at Interior, she has proved herself “very effective at bending the bureaucracy to the administration’s will.”

The Missing Documents

A longtime legislative staffer on Capitol Hill, MacGregor was particularly effective at concealing records of her meetings with oil companies during the first Trump administration. During her first two years at DOI, MacGregor and her then-boss, David Bernhardt, held 12 times more meetings with fossil energy companies than with non-fossil interests, according to an analysis of their official calendars. But breaking with previous practice, notes, briefings, and other records related to MacGregor’s meetings were often stored in Google Docs that were never preserved as federal records, making them unrecoverable by public records officials and, as a result, preventing the public from ever seeing them.

In one instance, MacGregor met with Harold Hamm in 2017 to discuss the Bureau of Land Management’s venting and flaring rule, an Obama-era regulation intended to reduce methane emissions and boost royalty payments from drilling on public lands. Hamm, a major political and financial backer of Trump then and now, is the billionaire chairman of Continental Resources, a major fracking company with interests on public lands in North Dakota and Wyoming. Continental was one of the biggest players in North Dakota, and was systematically burning a massive amount of gas from its wells on public lands—the very issue the BLM’s rule was supposed to address.

Documents obtained via Freedom of Information Act request reveal that, on April 3, 2017, an assistant emailed MacGregor a briefing—a Google Doc titled "0404 Domestic Producers Alliance Mtg”—for her meeting with Harold Hamm and other oil executives the following day. A Freedom of Information Act request for documents from that meeting was filed on May 31, 2017. After seven years, the request could only be completed in part because the Google Docs created by DOI could not be accessed by records officials and the record holders, including MacGregor, did not comply with the request. The use of Google Docs implies MacGregor was not following record-preserving procedure either by failing to maintain records as she should under the Federal Records Act or alternatively disposing of information against DOI protocols. This same destruction of public records played out multiple times, with multiple hot-button issues, including with executive and secretarial orders related to offshore drilling and coal, according to partial records obtained by Fieldnotes.

The Trump administration declined to answer questions about MacGregor’s incomplete recordkeeping. Instead, Interior spokesperson Katie Martin responded with a lengthy statement that read, in part: “This line of attack from the media is a desperate and lame attempt to take down an extremely well qualified woman nominated to a leadership position in the Trump administration.” Attempts to reach MacGregor via her last known employer, NextEra Energy, were unsuccessful. Meanwhile, a woman who answered when Fieldnotes called a phone number known to be associated with MacGregor hung up after the researcher identified themselves. "I'm not doing that, sorry," the woman said. A follow-up text to that same number detailing the missing records similarly went unanswered.

While the vast majority of the records in question have been lost, some documentation from the meeting with Hamm was captured in a memo to then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. The memo, obtained via Freedom of Information Act request, includes a list of grievances the oil industry had with the BLM’s venting and flaring rule.

MacGregor, it appears, went on to spearhead efforts to kill the rule, following the oil & gas industry’s playbook of suspending implementation and ultimately repealing and replacing it with a much weaker one.

As part of that effort, oil & gas trade group Western Energy Alliance met with MacGregor on April 25, 2017, to discuss the original rule. In an internal memo to WEA members, Kathleen Sgamma—then the group’s president, now Trump’s pick to lead BLM—wrote: “I left Kate with a document of suggested next steps on the methane rule which had been developed by our legal team and vetted with litigation funders.” Soon after, DOI followed Sgamma’s recommendations by suspending the rule and eventually repealing the Obama-era requirements.

In December 2017, Sgamma sent a note thanking Zinke for suspending the rule, writing: “We wish to specifically recognize the efforts of Kate MacGregor regarding executing on the energy dominance agenda.”

This article was produced in partnership with HEATED, a must-read for anyone who cares about holding polluters accountable.

This past August, some of the country’s most powerful oil and gas executives gathered at a swanky Houston hotel to discuss what they would do if their well-financed efforts to secure Republican control of Washington succeeded.

Fieldnotes obtained internal documents revealing the details of that closed-door meeting, which were reported on by the Washington Post last month. But now that Republicans will indeed control not just the presidency, but both chambers of Congress, it’s worth revisiting the oil and gas industry’s strategy to dismantle climate policy and boost fossil fuel production over the next four years.

The strategy is laid out in the “2025 Policy Roadmap,” a plan drawn up by the American Exploration & Production Council, or AXPC. AXPC is a trade organization made up of ExxonMobil subsidiary XTO Energy, ConocoPhillips, and more than two dozen other oil and gas corporations. Each of these companies pays the group a quarter-million dollars a year to lobby on their behalf.

Taken together, the ideas outlined in AXPC’s roadmap would obliterate some of the government’s most powerful levers for tackling the climate crisis and protecting public health. And given AXPC’s ties to the MAGA movement, there’s good reason to believe its member corporations will get most if not all of what they want from Trump and his congressional allies.

Here’s a closer look at what AXPC and its members have planned for Trump 2.0.

Killing a powerful market tool to reduce methane

Earlier this month, EPA finalized a fee on methane emissions from the oil and gas sector. The fee, mandated by the Inflation Reduction Act, is the first direct charge that the federal government has ever imposed on greenhouse gas emissions. Some oil and gas corporations will soon have to pay $900 for every metric ton of methane they release, and the rate will increase to $1,500 in years to come. This creates a financial penalty on industry if it doesn’t stop emitting methane—a powerful heat-trapping gas responsible for about 30% of global warming.

AXPC really wants to kill the methane fee. In a slide presented to the board in August, the fee, also known as the waste emissions charge, ranks among the fastest moving, highest priority issues.

AXPC’s roadmap includes a recommendation to repeal the penalty. The most straightforward way to roll back the fee is for Republicans to revoke it through reconciliation, which allows Congress to bypass filibuster rules to pass budget-related measures.

AXPC is currently pressing Republicans to make that happen. Another slide presented to the board reads: “What we are doing now: Advocating with R’s for inclusion in reconciliation.” The lobbying group has influenced legislation before; it claims credit for securing a policy rider on a July appropriations bill passed by the House that sought to block the fee’s implementation.

Eliminating the methane fee would be a huge blow to the U.S.’s efforts to address climate change. EPA estimates that the fee will reduce methane emissions by 1.2 million metric tons through 2035, which is equivalent to removing nearly 8 million gas cars from the road for a year. Killing the fee would also harm public health. In addition to warming the planet, methane reacts with other gasses in the atmosphere to form smog, which causes around a million premature deaths each year.

Bringing back huge tax breaks for oil & gas drillers

For more than a century, the fossil fuel industry has benefited from a tax carveout available only to oil and gas corporations that allows them to write off approximately 85% of the cost of drilling new wells. But in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act changed how these deductions, known as intangible drilling costs, or IDCs, work.

Now, industry can no longer immediately deduct IDCs when calculating its taxable income, which means it can no longer recoup well drilling costs in the form of tax breaks right off the bat. This has caused considerable angst.

In 2025, parts of Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will expire, teeing up what Axios is predicting will be a “battle royale over tax policy.” Oil and gas corporations will be in the fray, and according to internal AXPC materials, “fixing the current tax treatment of IDCs is a consensus priority.”

AXPC sees two ways to achieve its preferred outcome: Congress could pass legislation narrowly targeting IDCs, or it could repeal the corporate alternative minimum tax entirely.

The lobbying group has close ties with two lawmakers who have already introduced a bill narrowly targeting IDCs. AXPC's PAC maxed out its campaign contributions to Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) and nearly maxed out its contributions to Rep. Mike Carey (R-Ohio), and the group hosted events for both sponsors in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

AXPC has also been laying the foundation in other ways. In July, AXPC member Ascent Resources hosted a roundtable for the GOP working group considering oil and gas tax provisions, led by Rep. Carol Miller (R-W.Va.). After the event, Miller put out a press release parroting industry’s talking points: “We must also protect intangible drilling costs and percentage depletion to create more opportunities to drill for oil and gas in the United States…”

With Republicans in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, AXPC now plans to “move [the IDC] fix through reconciliation.”

Granting industry’s wishes on IDCs would restore a massive tax break that exclusively benefits corporate oil and gas interests. Further subsidizing polluters allows them to rake in even higher profits as they wreck the climate.

Gutting environmental review for fossil fuel projects

The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, is a bedrock environmental law that requires agencies to consider environmental impacts before making major decisions, like granting permits. In recent years, the Biden administration has issued related rules requiring agencies to consider climate change and environmental justice impacts, too.

For decades, oil and gas corporations have chafed at NEPA requirements. Now, with Republicans and Democrats on the Hill both talking about permit reform, the industry sees an opportunity to gut the law.

According to the internal materials, AXPC’s “key permitting priority” is “creating a standard of judicial review for claims brought under the National Environmental Policy Act,” which would limit which agency decisions environmental groups can challenge in court.

AXPC is trying to limit the law in other ways, too, like by pushing a permitting reform bill introduced by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) that would shorten litigation windows and accelerate permitting decision timelines. The internal materials show that AXPC lobbied both Barrasso and Manchin on the legislation.

AXPC’s 2025 Policy Roadmap also includes a slew of recommendations to weaken NEPA, like jettisoning the Biden-era directives to consider climate change and environmental justice in permitting decisions.

A recent court decision, which is likely to be appealed and could eventually make it to the Supreme Court, has thrown into question how the federal government will interpret NEPA. But regardless of the outcome, the oil and gas industry plans to continue its campaign to defang the law.

Establishing a narrow standard of judicial review and putting unreasonable constraints on NEPA would likely mean environmental groups would win fewer legal challenges against oil and gas projects, like pipelines. Building more fossil fuel infrastructure would lock us into higher emissions in the future.

How likely is all this to happen?

AXPC and the oil and gas corporations it represents shouldn’t have any trouble gaining an audience with the Trump administration or with Republicans in Congress after cultivating close relationships with the MAGA movement.

Several board members, for instance, were on the attendee list for the Mar-a-Lago dinner this spring where Trump made his quid pro quo-themed promise to gut climate regulations in exchange for $1 billion in campaign donations. Another AXPC member executive, Hilcorp Energy founder Jeff Hildebrand, held multiple fundraisers for the president-elect and, along with his wife, contributed more than $3 million to Republicans last election. Meanwhile, AXPC spent more than a half-million dollars to help the GOP win Senate seats in Ohio, Montana, and Pennsylvania.

AXPC has enough political gravity that it was able to attract soon-to-be VP JD Vance and future Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to its events over the summer. And the group also appears to have made inroads with the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank at the center of planning for Trump’s second term. Slides prepared for an earlier AXPC board meeting in April list an op-ed penned by an AFPI director bashing the methane fee as one of AXPC’s accomplishments.

But the Trump trifecta the oil and gas sector was gunning for also brings new risks. If “moderation dissolves,” as AXPC fears it will, industry could be “caught in the middle” between overzealous Republicans and their investors. Many in the GOP want to take a wrecking ball to climate regulations, but investors would prefer they leave some in place—albeit without any teeth—so that corporations can sell LNG to the EU under the region’s new methane rules. Similarly, “overly biased” permitting decisions could leave oil and gas projects vulnerable to litigation. Or in perhaps the most interesting—and for some, most hopeful—finding from the internal documents, AXPC sees “populist pushback” as a wildcard that could one day stand in its way.

The deceptive practices—which include paying TikTok influencers to parrot industry talking points, running Facebook ads that violate Meta ad standards, attempting to “newsjack” Olympic coverage, and hiring an aged Hollywood actor to host an infomercial designed to pass as PBS programming—are detailed in internal strategy memos, confidential PowerPoint presentations, and other communications from the National Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR) and its allies dating back more than a half decade. Together, the material depicts a campaign drawn up to stem what the industry saw as a rising “tide of anti-plastic sentiment” and that features messaging the group is—at this very moment—using in Busan, South Korea, in an attempt to influence the UN negotiations underway there on a global treaty to curb plastic pollution (aka INC-5).

(A slide from a presentation given to NAPCOR’s Communications & Issues Management Committee in the summer 2024)

Founded nearly 40 years ago, NAPCOR represents companies up and down the plastic packaging chain that deal in polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, as the plastic used to make soda bottles and takeout clamshell containers is more commonly known. Among the nearly 70 corporations that pay dues for the right to have a say in the group’s strategy:

• INEOS, a multinational conglomerate that acquired BP’s petchem business several years ago; 

• Amcor, a global supplier of plastic food and beverage packaging for everything from soda to sauce; 

• Dart Container Corporation, maker of the Solo cups ubiquitous on American college campuses;

• And other corporate members, including the Eastman Chemical Company, Husky, and Sidel.

While NAPCOR focuses on promoting the use of PET packaging specifically, its efforts often overlap and align with a host of similar groups representing other petrochemical and plastic companies with their own vested interests in selling consumers on the benefits of recycling. Among those NAPCOR boasts internally of having developed “industry relationships” with, for example, are the Plastics Industry Association (PLASTICS), which is lobbying to vastly expand the definition of what is “recyclable,” and the Recycling Partnership, which is funded in part by ExxonMobil—the target of a lawsuit from California alleging a “decades-long campaign of deception” about the effectiveness of recycling.

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Internal documents obtained by Fieldnotes and reported on by the Washington Post reveal how some of the largest oil & gas companies in the United States plan to roll back regulation of their industry if Republicans win control of the presidency and both houses of Congress in November.

A 176-page packet compiled for the American Exploration & Production Council’s (AXPC) board of directors before an August 9th meeting details the groundwork the trade association has laid as well as its plans for the future — namely, killing the methane fee, weakening emissions regulations, cutting taxes for the oil & gas industry, and reforming permitting rules to make it harder to block projects through litigation.

How exactly will industry accomplish this? It’s all laid out in AXPC’s 2025 Policy Roadmap — the organization’s guide for campaigns and transition teams. A table of contents includes lists of existing executive orders to modify or revoke, new executive orders to enact, rulemakings to scrap or initiate, and scientific studies that would bolster AXPC’s positions.

AXPC counts among its members some of the largest oil & gas companies in the U.S., including ExxonMobil subsidiary XTO Energy, ConocoPhillips, and EQT Corporation (a top gas producer).

The internal documents shed new light on what the industry would get in return for supporting Trump, who earlier this year offered a “deal” to oil & gas executives: $1 billion in campaign donations in exchange for their preferred policy outcomes. Two executives of AXPC member companies — Nick Dell’Osso of Expand Energy and Toby Rice of EQT Corporation — were in the room when Trump made that pitch. Other executives, along with AXPC CEO Anne Bradbury, met with JD Vance in mid-June.

The documents also contain details on AXPC’s political expenditures, revealing that AXPC is working to ensure Trump has a friendly majority in Congress by spending over $1.3 million on the upcoming election with a focus on Senate races in Ohio, Montana, and Pennsylvania.

Read the full AXPC Board Book HERE

Find the list of executive orders HERE

Hypocrisy on methane

AXPC says that the oil & gas companies it represents are “committed” to reducing their emissions and support “effective and reasonable” methane regulations. To the public, lawmakers, and regulators, they portray themselves as responsible operators making a good faith effort to reduce emissions.

Internal documents paint a different picture.

Slides marked “Confidential” show that the volume of gas flared by AXPC member companies rose 21% from 2022 to 2023, and one company increased its flaring intensity 134% in recent years.

AXPC knew that many of the oil & gas companies it represents weren’t voluntarily reducing flaring, but still fought regulation. In fact, undermining EPA’s methane rules remains AXPC’s top priority.

During the rulemaking process, AXPC met with EPA on at least seven occasions, holding in-person meetings with rule-writing staff and political appointees, including Joe Goffman, the head of EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. Once EPA finalized its first rule, AXPC joined a coalition of trade associations and Republican-led states in suing the agency.

In 2025, the oil & gas industry plans to kill the methane fee with help from GOP allies. In the documents, AXPC claims credit for securing a key policy rider on a House appropriations bill passed in July 2024 that would block implementation of the methane fee. (That provision most likely won’t pass in the Senate.) AXPC’s wishlist for the next administration includes a recommendation to scrap the fee, and the group is currently pressing Republicans to repeal it through reconciliation if they control Congress next year.

Tax cuts and permitting reform

AXPC’s other priorities include cutting taxes for the oil & gas industry and rewriting permitting rules.

At the end of 2025, parts of Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will expire, teeing up what Axios has called a “battle royale over tax policy.” AXPC sees this as an opportunity to push the industry’s agenda on intangible drilling costs (IDCs). The group wants Congress to “fix” the tax code so oil & gas companies can immediately deduct IDCs from their income under the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax. AXPC is already lobbying Republicans to get this done next year.

On permitting reform, the group’s key priority is creating a standard of judicial review for claims brought under NEPA, which would make it harder for environmental groups and property owners to ensure oil & gas projects follow environmental and historic preservation laws. AXPC supports Manchin and Barrasso’s recently-introduced energy permitting reform legislation, but notes that it doesn’t tackle the judicial review issue.

AXPC also plans to gut Biden-era NEPA rules that direct agencies to consider climate change and environmental justice in permitting decisions.

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