From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Nick Pope

“The Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright sharply criticized the Biden administration’s restrictive energy policies during a keynote speech to energy industry leaders Monday, explaining how the Trump administration’s approach is oriented around unlocking human flourishing.

Wright made the speech to kick off the 2025 CERAWeek conference, one of the premier annual summits for the energy industry. He characterized the Biden administration’s maniacal focus on climate change as counterproductive and impoverishing for ordinary people, pledging to take a radically different approach than his predecessor by unleashing U.S. energy and private sector innovations to make life better and more affordable for Americans, announcing that he is approving a liquefied natural gas (LNG) permit during the speech to prove his point.

“The previous administration’s ‘climate’ policies have been impoverishing to our citizens, economically destructive to our businesses, and politically polarizing. The ‘cure’ was far more destructive than the disease,” Wright said. “There are no winners in that world, except for politicians and rapidly growing interest groups. The only interest group that we are concerned with is the American people. Our focus will be steadfast on the American people and our allies abroad.”

Wright explained how much of the world’s population lives in poverty in large part because they do not have access to the cheap, efficient energy that powers modern life and its conveniences that only a fraction of humanity enjoys at present. The new energy secretary — who has worked with nuclear, oil, gas, solar and geothermal energy over the course of his private sector career — argued that the U.S. can and should play a leading role in proliferating prosperity with energy instead of regulating the sector too aggressively in the name of climate change.

“Recently I have been called a climate denier or climate skeptic. This is simply wrong. I am a climate realist. I have been studying and writing about climate change for over twenty years. The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is: a global physical phenomenon that is a side-effect of building the modern world,” Wright said. “We have indeed raised atmospheric CO2 concentration by 50% in the process of more than doubling human life expectancy, lifting most of the world’s citizens out of grinding poverty, launching modern medicine, telecommunications, planes, trains and automobiles too. Everything in life involves trade offs. Everything.”

“The Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens. Running the math on what might have been the benefits from these policies yields perhaps only a few hundredths of a degree reduction in global temperatures in the year 2100,” Wright continued. “The Trump administration intends to be much more scientific and mathematically literate.”

While former President Joe Biden said that climate change poses a threat to humanity that exceeds that presented by nuclear war, Wright’s remarks make clear that the Trump administration will not be treating climate change as an existential threat that takes precedence over other priorities.

The vision Wright laid out in his speech represents a stark departure from the positions of the Biden administration on nearly all fronts, including on the issue of approvals for LNG export projects. The Biden administration unilaterally froze approvals in January 2024, keeping the pause in place for most of the year, in what critics characterized as an election year move to shore up support from the well-funded climate lobby.

To drive home his point that American energy is open for business with the Trump administration leading in Washington, Wright announced that he will be approving a LNG permit extension for the Delfin LNG project, a major development proposed for construction off the Louisiana coast and a victim of the Biden administration’s January 2024 freeze on approvals.

“I am honored to play a role in reversing what I believe has been a very poor direction in energy policy. The previous administration’s energy policy was focused myopically on climate change, with people as simply collateral damage. My predecessor was on this stage one year ago saying that LNG exports would soon be in the rear view mirror. Think about that for a moment,” Wright said during his speech. “Natural gas today supplies 25% of global primary energy and has been the fastest growing source of energy over the last 15 years. Wind and solar, the darlings of the last administration and so much of the world today, supply roughly 3% of global primary energy … Everywhere wind and solar penetration have increased significantly, prices on the grid went up and stability of the grid went down.”

From from undercover news report from Project Veritas

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Michael Bastasch

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — yes, the agency that’s supposed to make sure the air and water is clean — has been caught red-handed in what, at least on the outside, looks like one of the most brazen and high-dollar left-wing political payouts of the century.

In what Trump EPA described in a letter to the agency inspector general’s office as “an unprecedented arrangement,” Biden-era bureaucrats used private Citibank bank accounts to squirrel away $20 billion in taxpayer funds — that’s right, billion with a “b” — much of which is earmarked for lefty “pass-through” organizations the agency itself determined “lacked basic financial competency.”

This $20 billion was ostensibly meant for “green banks” to finance all sorts of nice-sounding “climate justice” and green energy projects — but instead it steered billions upon billions to groups deeply tied into the Democratic Party machinery.

For instance, the current and former chairmen of one of the pass-throughs, called the Coalition for Green Capital (CGC), are both Democratic Party donors, each cutting sizable checks to Kamala Harris’ ill-fated 2024 run. CGC was on track to get $5 billion from Biden’s EPA.

In another case, a left-wing consortium tied to Stacey Abrams’s voter mobilization group was awarded $2 billion. In its letter to the IG, Trump’s EPA noted the former administration itself determined these groups “lacked basic financial competency,” but earmarked the cash anyway.

So, here we have billions in taxpayer funds being directed to Democratic insiders and donors — paging DOGE! No wonder bureaucrats shoveled this money into a seemingly untouchable Citibank account in the waning days of the Biden administration.

One former Biden EPA official was reportedly caught on tape gleefully comparing it to “tossing gold bars off the Titanic.”

Taken together, this looks like the left-wing political payout of the century. Rarely is rank political patronage so nakedly on display.

The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) and FBI are currently asking tough questions of career EPA officials about these “gold bars,” but it’s unclear if the Trump EPA will be able to claw back any of the funds.

Accountability — after four years of virtually none of it — would not only be a victory for taxpayers, but also for good journalism.

It’s important to remember we’re only talking about this Biden EPA scandal because of the tireless efforts of one journalist. Long before the EPA inspector general, DOJ, the FBI, or even the Department of Government Efficiency, were alerted to this political payout, a reporter named Nick Pope was on the case.

Back in November 2023, when the Biden EPA announced it was handing out billions to so-called “green banks” in the name of “climate justice” and other high causes, Pope thought this might be the perfect cover for the Democratic Party to enrich itself at taxpayer expense.

No slouch, Pope dug in, and soon he saw smoke. Huge, billowing clouds of smoke. His first piece, published that same month, laid out in detail how the “green banks” on the shortlist for Biden EPA funding “all feature numerous individuals on their boards who work for influential organizations aligned with the Democratic Party or previously worked for Democratic administrations.”

But this was no one-off. Pope followed up when the EPA announced it was handing billions to the very groups he had just exposed as essentially being Democratic Party pass-throughs.

Government watchdog groups were put on alert. Congress eventually got involved, demanding answers from the Biden EPA about how something like this could even happen. Pope’s colleague Adam Pack left his own mark, first reporting about the billions going to the liberal consortium affiliated with Abrams’ get-out-the-vote efforts.

Even after the FBI got involved, Pope didn’t rest, pushing out yet another hard-hitting investigation exposing how heads of the groups slated to get billions in Biden bucks “collectively made hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal political donations to Democratic candidates and organizations in recent years.”

If Trump is actually able to claw back these “gold bars,” make sure to thank Nick Pope. Heck, even if we don’t get the money back, thank him anyway. Good journalism should be rewarded even if the ultimate outcome isn’t exactly what we wanted.

Besides, they don’t give out Pulitzers for exposing Democratic corruption, now do they?

While trust in media plummets, and the legacy press continues its liberal bootlicking, it’s even more important we support good journalists, like Pope and the rest of the Daily Caller News Foundation team, who are unafraid to report the truth and hold the powerful accountable.

Mike Bastasch is editor-in-chief of the Daily Caller News Foundation.