Marc Racicot is an American attorney, lobbyist, and former Republican politician who served as the 21st governor of Montana from 1993 until 2001. After leaving office, Racicot worked as a lobbyist for the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani. His notable clients included Enron, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, and the Recording Industry Association of America.
The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) is a division of the Executive Office of the President that coordinates federal environmental efforts in the United States and works closely with agencies and other White House offices on the development of environmental and energy policies and initiatives.
Myron Ebell is an American climate change denier who served as the Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), an American libertarian advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. He was also chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a politically conservative group formed in 1997 focused on "dispelling the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific, and risk analysis". In September 2016, Ebell was appointed by then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to lead his transition team for the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity is a U.S. non-profit advocacy group representing major American coal producers, utility companies and railroads. The organization seeks to influence public opinion and legislation in favor of coal-generated electricity in the United States, placing emphasis on the development and deployment of clean coal technologies.
William Kane Reilly was Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H. W. Bush. He has served as president of World Wildlife Fund, as a founder or advisor to several business ventures, and on many boards of directors. In 2010, he was appointed by President Barack Obama co-chair of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling to investigate the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Edward Scott Pruitt is an American attorney, lobbyist and Republican politician from the state of Oklahoma. He served as the 14th Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from February 17, 2017, to July 9, 2018, during the Donald Trump presidency, resigning while under at least 14 federal investigations. Pruitt denies the scientific consensus on climate change.
Jay Carney is an American public relations officer, political advisor, and journalist who served as the United States' White House Press Secretary from 2011 to 2014, and Amazon's Senior Vice President of Global Corporate Affairs from 2015 to 2022. Since 2022, he has been Global Head of Policy and Communications at Airbnb.
The fossil fuels lobby includes paid representatives of corporations involved in the fossil fuel industry, as well as related industries like chemicals, plastics, aviation and other transportation. Because of their wealth and the importance of energy, transport and chemical industries to local, national and international economies, these lobbies have the capacity and money to attempt to have outsized influence on governmental policy. In particular, the lobbies have been known to obstruct policy related to environmental protection, environmental health and climate action.
The 2008 congressional elections in Arizona were held on November 4, 2008, to determine who would represent the state of Arizona in the United States House of Representatives, coinciding with the presidential election. Representatives are elected for two-year terms; those elected would serve in the 111th Congress from January 4, 2009, until January 3, 2011.
The environmental policy of the United States is a federal governmental action to regulate activities that have an environmental impact in the United States. The goal of environmental policy is to protect the environment for future generations while interfering as little as possible with the efficiency of commerce or the liberty of the people and to limit inequity in who is burdened with environmental costs. As his first official act bringing in the 1970s, President Richard Nixon signed the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) into law on New Year's Day, 1970. Also in the same year, America began celebrating Earth Day, which has been called "the big bang of U.S. environmental politics, launching the country on a sweeping social learning curve about ecological management never before experienced or attempted in any other nation." NEPA established a comprehensive US national environmental policy and created the requirement to prepare an environmental impact statement for "major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the environment." Author and consultant Charles H. Eccleston has called NEPA the world's "environmental Magna Carta".
Coal mining is an industry in transition in the United States. Production in 2019 was down 40% from the peak production of 1,171.8 million short tons in 2008. Employment of 43,000 coal miners is down from a peak of 883,000 in 1923. Generation of electricity is the largest user of coal, being used to produce 50% of electric power in 2005 and 27% in 2018. The U.S. is a net exporter of coal. U.S. coal exports, for which Europe is the largest customer, peaked in 2012. In 2015, the U.S. exported 7.0 percent of mined coal.
Thomas G. Andrews is an American historian.
Jeffrey Darren Duncan is a United States representative for South Carolina's 3rd congressional district since 2011. His district comprises nine counties, two of these counties being manufacturing centers for the state. On January 17, 2024, Duncan announced that he would not run for re-election. Duncan previously served in the South Carolina House of Representatives from 2002 to 2010 when he retired to run for the U.S. House of Representatives.
Richard William Painter is an American lawyer, professor, and political candidate. From 2005 to 2007 Painter was the chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. He is the S. Walter Richey Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Minnesota, and since 2016 has served as vice-chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a government watchdog group.
The Stream Protection Rule was a United States federal regulation issued by the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement that went into effect on January 19, 2017. These regulations implement Title V of the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA). The original regulations had been issued in 1979 and were updated in 1983. Litigation over mountaintop removal mining required changes to the regulations, which were issued in 2008. These regulations were in turn struck down by a judge after litigation by environmental groups. The new regulations, the Stream Protection Rule, were issued in January 2017.
The environmental policy of the first Donald Trump administration represented a shift from the policy priorities and goals of the preceding Barack Obama administration. Where President Obama's environmental agenda prioritized the reduction of carbon emissions through the use of renewable energy with the goal of conserving the environment for future generations, the Trump administration policy was for the US to attain energy independence based on fossil fuel use and to rescind many environmental regulations. By the end of Trump's term, his administration had rolled back 98 environmental rules and regulations, leaving an additional 14 rollbacks still in progress. As of early 2021, the Biden administration was making a public accounting of regulatory decisions under the Trump administration that had been influenced by politics rather than science.
David Longly Bernhardt is an American lawyer who served as the 53rd United States Secretary of the Interior from 2019 to 2021 in the administration of Donald Trump. He previously was a shareholder at the Colorado law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, where he was an oil and energy industry lobbyist and natural resources attorney. He began working for the United States Department of the Interior (DOI) in 2001, and served as the department's solicitor from 2006 to 2009 and deputy secretary from 2017 to 2019.
Andrew R. Wheeler is an American attorney who served as the 15th administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 2019 to 2021. He served as the deputy administrator from April to July 2018, and served as the acting administrator from July 2018 to February 2019. He has been a senior advisor to Governor of Virginia Glenn Youngkin since March 2022. He previously worked in the law firm Faegre Baker Daniels, representing coal magnate Robert E. Murray and lobbying against the Obama administration's environmental regulations. Wheeler served as chief counsel to the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and to the chairman U.S. senator James Inhofe, prominent for his rejection of climate change. Wheeler is a critic of limits on greenhouse gas emissions and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
David Patrick Ross is an American environmental and land-use lawyer who served as the Assistant Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from 2018 to 2021. Prior to his EPA role, he was a Wisconsin assistant attorney general and director of the state's environmental-protection judicial unit.
William Ludwig Wehrum Jr. is an American attorney, lobbyist, and government official who served as Assistant Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency for Air and Radiation in the first Donald Trump administration.
