Fueling The Conversation, Week of December 23rd, 2025
During this holiday season, it’s important to take a moment to be grateful for the things that matter most in life: family, friends, and the comforts of home. And there’s one more thing that matters – reliable and affordable energy. But enjoying the holidays has gotten a whole lot harder thanks to past policies that aimed to restrict our energy potential and make electricity and gasoline prices more expensive. Fortunately, the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans have been hard at work all year long, taking over 200 actions to undo the policies of the previous administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress.
We should use this season as a time to reflect on how far we’ve come in such a short period of time from the Biden-era prohibitions on natural gas, oil, coal production (and gas-powered cars and trucks for that matter). However, it’s also critical to stay vigilant against attempts to ongoing threats on the international, federal, and state levels.
Internationally, COP30 wrapped up in November. Though there was no specific mention of phasing out fossil fuels, attending nations agreed to triple the funding provided from wealthier to poorer countries for climate adaptation. In a similar vein, the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization almost passed the first-ever global carbon tax on international shipping, with a vote on the measure being postponed thanks only to pressure from the Trump administration. Both of these steps supersede the desires of the American people by prioritizing international net-zero goals over affordability.
Meanwhile, the wins we’ve seen over the past year have not caused Democrats and their “green” allies to give up their crusade against oil and gas at the federal level. As reported by E&E News, “A group of Democrats are reviving a package of bills that would tighten federal regulations for oil and gas drilling… The five-bill package, dubbed the ‘Frack Pack,’ aims to hold oil and gas companies accountable to national standards for air and water quality. It would also eliminate the so-called Halliburton Loophole, which has exempted fracking fluids from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act since 2005.” Ironically, attempts to make oil and natural gas production cleaner will have the reverse effect. Increasing the costs of production in the U.S. through regulatory barriers will force more production out of the country to countries with worse environmental standards.
We make this point in our forthcoming 2026 Environmental Quality Index (EQI), which contextualized oil and gas production data and the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) score — a measure produced by Yale University that ranks countries based on “58 indicators across 11 issue categories, ranging from climate change mitigation and air pollution to waste management, sustainability of fisheries and agriculture, deforestation, and biodiversity protection” — of the top oil and natural gas producing countries. According to the EQI, “The production-weighted average EPI of 48.14 represents the environmental quality score of the average barrel of oil produced by the [top oil-producing countries]. The United States’ EPI score of 57.2 is 9.06 points higher than the production-weighted average of 48.14 for this major group of global producers.”
Impelling oil and gas production to countries with poor legal protections and inferior technology, and, therefore, lower environmental quality, harms businesses, consumers, and air and water quality. Fortunately, the Trump administration’s deregulatory actions and Congress’s Congressional Review Act resolutions have set the stage for American producers to drill and mine for energy with significantly fewer obstacles than seen under Biden.
Unfortunately, “green” activists are seeking to reverse these gains with the silver bullet of climate litigation. In state courts across the country, plaintiffs are accusing oil and gas companies of lying about the climate harms of their products and claiming damages resulting from numerous tort law violations. Concurrently, Democrats in Virginia are attempting to pass a bill forcing electric utilities to transition low-income residents from “delivered and stored fuels,” i.e., fossil fuel appliances, as part of energy efficiency upgrades. State-level policies and lawsuits may hide net-zero goals behind amiable language, but the reality is they have the same effect as regulations and taxes on reliable energy consumption. One of the lawyers for Boulder County, Colorado, in their climate lawsuit admitted as much, claiming that “the tort liability is an indirect carbon tax.”
This holiday season, I’m grateful for sensible energy policies that allow the U.S. to fuel our industry and facilitate human flourishing. But at every level of government, anti-energy policies are being pushed to reverse or circumvent the gains made by the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans. That means there is much more work to be done to oppose government-controlled energy policies at all levels of government and in the courts. But for now, enjoy the holidays and Happy New Year.
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Fueling the Conversation, a weekly column by IER President Tom Pyle, offers a principled take on energy events. Energy underpins all aspects of modern life, so policies that artificially limit production hurt everyday people paying to heat their homes and drive to work. “Green” groups push these policies for ideological reasons, but this column uses economic logic and hard facts to advocate for energy freedom.
