The former Republican congressperson selected by Donald Trump to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, has the backing of a religious-right fracking billionaire from Texas.
Zeldin is currently a chair at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a conservative think tank co-founded by Tim Dunn, founder of the fracking company CrownQuest, one of the biggest privately owned oil producers in the country.
Dunn, who has a net worth of $2.2 billion, was one of Trump’s biggest donors, contributing $5 million through his company to the Super PAC Make America Great Again. He’s been vocal about wanting Trump to reverse policies aimed at slowing climate change.
“It would be ideal if we could get rid of this ‘CO2 as a pollutant’ business,” Dunn said at an AFPI event in 2023, stating that he hoped a Trump presidency could use executive orders “to curb all this silliness about CO2 emissions.”
Zeldin, a former House representative who campaigned unsuccessfully to be governor of New York in 2022, doesn’t have a lengthy track record in climate change and energy. But climate advocates predict that as head of the EPA he will loyally implement policies favorable to oil and gas producers.
“He will move to execute a fossil-fuel agenda on behalf of the far-right and billionaire donors like Dunn,” Pete Sikora, climate campaigns director for the nonprofit New York Communities for Change, told DeSmog.
The AFPI didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog about Zeldin and Dunn.
Zeldin’s AFPI role
Zeldin posted on X this week that he is “looking forward to getting straight to work as part of President Trump’s Cabinet to unleash US energy dominance, make America the AI capital of the world, bring American auto jobs back home, and so much more.”
Prior to Trump picking him as EPA head, Zeldin was appointed chair of the AFPI’s China Policy Initiative and the group’s Pathway to 2025 initiative, which aimed to promote “policy innovation, America First messaging opportunities, coalition building, and the preparation of a battle plan for the next conservative administration.”
A policy document from the think tank refers to the landmark 2015 Paris climate framework as an example of “lop-sided, unenforceable, America-last international agreements,” and claims that the Biden administration and climate advocates used “a myopic focus on climate change as a justification for its sweeping radical agenda and massive government expansions.”
The document calls for the federal government to open the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, attack legislation including the Clean Air Act and Endangered Species Act, and streamline federal approvals for liquefied natural gas export projects.
That approach “coincides perfectly with Dunn’s economic interests in extracting every last drop of oil and gas in the Permian Basin, thereby torching the climate, while he makes an enormous profit,” Sikora claimed.
Dunn’s influence on Trump
For years, Dunn primarily focused his political advocacy on contributing to the election campaigns of Republicans in his home state of Texas, who shared his far-right views on social issues and a more significant role for conservative Christianity in politics.
But after Trump’s defeat in 2020, Dunn was reportedly approached by Brooke Rollins, who previously served as Trump’s director of domestic policy, and Linda McMahon, a former member of his cabinet, about creating a think tank that could help guide a potential second Trump administration.
Dunn helped found the AFPI shortly after and currently serves on its board of directors. He also funds or helps lead other groups looking to influence Trump, including America First Legal and the Center for Renewing America. He co-founded the Convention of States, which observers described to DeSmog as an effort to rewrite the U.S. Constitution according to Christian Nationalist principles.
Dunn has serious financial interests on the line. He’s signed a deal to sell much of his fracking company, CrownQuest, to Occidental Petroleum, a transaction that could personally add an additional $2.2 billion to his net worth. During a Houston fundraiser this year, Trump suggested he would look into streamlining federal approvals for oil and gas mergers and acquisitions, according to a report in the Washington Post.
A massive expansion of fossil fuels under a Zeldin-led EPA could endanger not only the international target of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, but may also compromise efforts to achieve the much less ideal target of 2 degrees, Sikora noted.
“It’s deeply scary,” Sikora said. Zeldin’s allegiances aren’t to the American public, he argued, but instead “to a giant billionaire fracker from Texas.”
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