President Donald Trump is back in the White House and hitting the gas on dismantling the Biden administration’s climate agenda with a speed that could make even the most seasoned D.C. insider dizzy.
According to Just The News, in a whirlwind of executive orders and Congressional support, Trump’s second term has already racked up 200 actions in just 200 days to boost oil and gas production while slamming the brakes on Biden-era green policies, according to a detailed tracker by the American Energy Alliance (AEA).
Let’s rewind to the starting line: Trump campaigned hard on a promise to undo what he called a misguided climate obsession, dismissing climate change as a “hoax” and vowing to halt offshore wind projects and electric vehicle mandates pushed by his predecessor.
On his very first day back in office, Trump signed a flurry of executive orders, including the bold “Unleashing American Energy” directive, setting the tone for a fossil fuel-friendly administration.
He didn’t stop there—Trump slapped a moratorium on offshore wind projects and new wind or solar permits on federal lands, while also revoking Biden’s “climate crisis” declarations and pulling the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Adding fuel to the fire, Trump ended Biden’s pause on liquefied natural gas export permits, with the Department of Energy approving the first permit within a month and several more following soon after.
To understand the stakes, look at Biden’s tenure: on his first day in 2021, he canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and banned oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, while pushing a heavy-handed social cost of carbon metric.
Just a week later, Biden doubled down with a moratorium on new oil and gas leasing on public lands and offshore waters, moves that the AEA tracked as part of 125 restrictive actions by mid-2022, a number that doubled by the end of his term.
By 2023, Biden had withdrawn vast areas of Alaska from oil exploration and blocked leases on millions of acres in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, while a mere 219 onshore leases per year were issued in the lower 48 states compared to Trump’s first-term average of 1,244.
Fast forward to Trump’s return, and the Bureau of Land Management was issuing leases on public lands within weeks, a sharp pivot from Biden’s tight grip on energy exploration.
By March, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced a sweeping plan for 31 deregulatory actions, targeting Biden’s climate rules like the Clean Power Plan 2.0 and tailpipe emission standards tied to electric vehicle mandates.
In July, the EPA even proposed repealing the Obama-era “endangerment finding,” a legal cornerstone for regulating vehicle emissions, signaling a full-throttle rejection of progressive energy policies.
Congress hasn’t sat idly by either—in February, the House passed the “Protecting American Energy Production Act” to prevent presidential bans on hydraulic fracturing without legislative approval, though it awaits Senate action.
That same month, lawmakers voted to scrap Biden’s methane fee on oil and gas companies, a policy that penalized excess emissions, while in July, they passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to curb tax credits long propping up renewable energy.
As Alex Stevens of the Institute for Energy Research noted, “Some of the things that dragged on for several years, like pulling out of the Paris Agreement during his first term, like that was done day one.” While Stevens sees the pace as impressive, one wonders if such breakneck speed risks overlooking the balance needed for long-term energy stability—still, it’s hard to argue with results that prioritize American jobs over globalist green dreams.
