Asked about Trump’s role, Sommers said, “I blame him completely.”
“He has proven himself unworthy of the office of being president,” Sommers added. Referring to the demonstrators who stormed the House and Senate, Sommers said: “This country has relied on the peaceful transfer of power since our founding. What happened today was an absolute outrage and the parties responsible should be held accountable.”
API, the largest lobbying group for the petroleum industry in Washington, is nonpartisan. But Sommers arrived there in 2018 squarely from the realm of Republican politics, having worked for two decades for former House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).
The siege stirred the ire of business leaders, who crave predictability from government, like never before during Trump’s term.
Their days of once applauding the tax cuts and deregulatory actions of the Trump administration appear to be over after Trump used incendiary language and urged his supporters to head to the Capitol earlier Wednesday. He then tweeted after the mob broke out that “[t]hese are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away” and continued falsely claiming he won the November election.
An individual major oil company, Chevron, is now taking the unusual step of calling for “peaceful transition” to the Biden administration.
Unions and a manufacturing group are calling on Vice President Pence and Trump’s Cabinet to remove him from office.
Jay Timmons, head of the National Association of Manufacturers, which represents 14,000 companies from across energy-intensive industrial sectors, called on those around Trump to “seriously consider” invoking the 25th Amendment to boot him from office with just two weeks left in his term.
“The outgoing president incited violence in an attempt to retain power, and any elected leader defending him is violating their oath to the Constitution and rejecting democracy in favor of anarchy,” Timmons said. “Anyone indulging conspiracy theories to raise campaign dollars is complicit.”
Timmons, too, previously worked for elected Republicans, including as chief of staff to Sen. George Allen (R-Va.). His group successfully lobbied the Trump administration to lift a moratorium on coal-mining leases and rewrite the Obama-era Clean Power Plan.
North America’s Building Trades Unions, an alliance of 14 construction unions, including electric workers and pipe fitters, similarly called for Trump to “immediately step down.”
“If he refuses, the Cabinet must immediately invoke the 25th amendment to remove the President,” Sean McGarvey, the group’s president, said. “Any less action by the Cabinet, and America should consider them all co-conspirators.”
That’s a far cry from what McGarvey called their “common bond with the president” during Trump’s first year in office, when the president was promising to boost infrastructure spending.
And Thomas Donohue, chief executive of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, similarly condemned the violence: “The attacks against our nation’s Capitol Building and our democracy must end now. The Congress of the United States must gather again this evening to conclude their constitutional responsibility to accept the report of the Electoral College.”
The energy sector have moved from Trump’s defeat weeks ago, despite his refusal to concede.
Before Trump’s defeat, the oil and gas group strung up a series of policy wins with the rollback of safety rules meant to prevent another Deepwater Horizon spill and protections for birds that die in uncovered industrial pits.
But they also acknowledged and congratulated Biden on his win well before many Republican lawmakers did — eager to make sure they have seat at the table when it comes to crafting Biden’s policies on climate change and other issues.
Steven Mufson contributed to this report.
Power plays
Trump auctioned drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
“But with lackluster oil prices and an increasing number of banks saying they would not finance Arctic energy projects, major oil companies did not try to buy the leases,” Eilperin and Mufson write. “The sale of 11 tracts on 600,000 acres netted roughly $14 million, a tiny fraction of what Republicans initially predicted it would yield. Only two of the bids were competitive.”
Alaska’s state agency, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, was the main bidder, putting up all but two of the winning bids. The agency agreed to place minimum bids on all tracts as a backstop in case no other buyers came forward. It can sell or sublet the leases in the future.
A 2017 law requires the government to hold another lease auction by the end of 2024, but it’s possible that Democrats, who narrowly gained control of the Senate in two runoff races held Tuesday, will overturn this provision. Biden has said that he opposes any development on the refuge.
A push for stricter building standards in flood zones could leave Biden with a difficult test.
The Natural Resources Defense Council and the Association of State Floodplain Managers filed a petition demanding tougher building standards in flood zones to protect millions of Americans from the worsening effects of climate change. But such changes are likely to increase the price of development and spark a strong backlash from local governments and home builders, the New York Times reports.
“The push is a preview of the challenge facing Mr. Biden, who made addressing climate change a central part of his campaign and must now decide what Americans are willing to accept to accomplish that goal,” the New York Times writes.
The fact that the NRDC is involved in the petition could make it particularly difficult for the administration to ignore, given that Biden has tapped the group’s president, Gina McCarthy, to coordinate domestic climate policy in his incoming administration.
Fuel economy dropped in the U.S. as Americans shifted to larger SUVs.
An Environmental Protection Agency report found that fuel economy of model year 2019 vehicles dropped for the first time in five years, the Associated Press reports. The report found that gas mileage fell by 0.2 miles per gallon, while greenhouse gas emissions rose by 3 grams per mile traveled compared to 2018.
The EPA said that the changes show that emissions standards set by the Obama administration were unrealistic. To comply with those standards, which the Trump administration rolled back starting in 2021, 11 of 14 major automakers had to rely on credits from prior years or those purchased from companies with fuel-efficient vehicles.
“But environmental groups say that automakers used loopholes and stopped marketing fuel-efficient cars and electric vehicles knowing that the Trump administration was about to roll back mileage and pollution standards,” the Associated Press writes.
In yet another environmental rollback, the Trump administration issued permits that could weaken protections for waterways.
The permits issued by the Army Corps of Engineers under the Clean Water Act authorize certain work, including construction and dredging, in protected streams and wetlands. Environmental groups say that the permits, which were fast-tracked to come out two years earlier than expected, will give developers and industry more license to pollute waterways.
Extra mileage
Nature can be coldhearted.
It’s that time of year, again: Wood frogs in Denali National Park are frozen solid as they hibernate to survive the winter. Their lungs and heart will stop until they thaw out in the spring.
