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On March 14, 2025, President Trump signed legislation disapproving the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation implementing the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax on methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.

On December 26, 2024, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the Climate Change Superfund Act (“CCSA” or the “Act”) into law.

Despite the Biden administration’s public support for carbon capture and sequestration (“CCS”), we saw neither faster CCS permit approvals from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) nor a significant push towards state primary enforcement authority (“primacy”) during the former president’s tenure.

On February 19, 2025, the Council on Environmental Quality (“CEQ”) released a pre-publication version of an interim final rule (the “Interim Rule”) to rescind all of CEQ’s previous and current regulations implementing the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) alongside a memorandum (the “Memo”) to federal agencies providing guidance on how agencies should revise their individual NEPA regulations and how they should manage NEPA reviews in the meantime.

In his first two days in office, newly inaugurated President Donald J. Trump signed a flurry of Executive Orders, including several aimed at supporting the traditional energy industry.

On February 3, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California granted a partial motion to dismiss filed by the California Air Resources Board (“CARB”), dismissing the claims that SB 253 (the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act) and SB 261 (the Climate-related Financial Risk Act) (collectively the “California Climate Laws”) violate the Supremacy Clause and limitations on extraterritorial regulation.

After little more than a week in office, there is still plenty of speculation, but priorities of the Trump 2.0 Administration are becoming more concrete.

The incoming Trump Administration is expected to prioritize the rollback of Biden-era endangered species regulations, aiming to reduce the regulatory burden on land-intensive businesses and enhance energy independence. This shift may involve reinstating Trump-era rules that limit critical habitat designations and economic considerations in listing decisions. As these changes unfold, businesses could face fewer restrictions related to endangered species, potentially facilitating development, and reducing compliance costs.

On December 17, 2024, the Office of Fossil and Carbon Management of the Department of Energy (“DOE”) released the long-awaited Liquefied Natural Gas (“LNG”) Export Study (“Study”). The Study was released 11 months after the Biden administration paused pending decisions to export LNG to non-Free Trade Agreement (“FTA”) countries on January 26, 2024.

In 2020, President-elect Donald Trump promised to ensure that “America’s most critical infrastructure projects” would not be “tied up and bogged down by an outrageously slow and burdensome federal approval process.” Much of the frustration with the federal approval process is directed at real-world implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) and its associated regulations.

The International Court of Justice has been asked to issue an advisory opinion on this question, and is currently hearing submissions from States, NGOs and international organisations.

During the 2024 campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised his supporters that he would direct federal agencies on day one to “immediately remove every single burdensome regulation driving up the cost of goods.” For the energy industry, a promise of rapid deregulation could result in significant revisions to the Biden administration’s numerous climate-focused rules. There are some actions that the new administration can take to immediately impact previous policies.