With Ready Orders and an Energy Czar, Trump Plots Pivot to Fossil Fuels

As President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition team plans his energy and environment agenda, it is relying on two seasoned former cabinet leaders and fossil fuel lobbyists to dramatically reshape the agencies charged with protecting the nation’s air, water, climate and public lands, according to six people familiar with the matter.

The task is familiar to David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist who headed the Interior Department in the first Trump administration, and Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who ran the Environmental Protection Agency. Both are Washington insiders who have years of experience in dismantling federal environmental protections.

People working on the transition have already prepared a slate of executive orders and presidential proclamations on climate and energy. They include withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, eliminating every office in every agency working to end the pollution that disproportionately affects poor communities and shrinking the size of national monuments in the West to allow more drilling and mining on public lands.

President Biden has made environmental justice a top priority and has sought to ensure that underserved communities benefit from at least 40 percent of clean energy development. That initiative will be scrapped, people familiar with the plan said. The move will be part of a greater effort to dismantle what Mr. Trump’s allies view as the “woke” agenda and any programs that do not help improve the economy.

The boundaries of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in southern Utah will be immediately redrawn to reflect changes that Mr. Trump made in 2017, when he opened hundreds of thousands of acres of land considered sacred to several Native tribes to mining and other development. Mr. Biden expanded the protected areas in 2021.

Mr. Trump is also expected to move swiftly to end the Biden administration’s pause on permitting new natural gas export terminals, and to revoke a longstanding waiver that allows California and other states to set tighter pollution standards than the federal government.