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Catanzaro

STAFFER MAFIA

INHOFE MANDY

CGCN CLARK LOBBY SZABO

see MARC HIMMELSTEIN POW

BERNHARDT

KOCH KUSLOW MORANO PYLE

SCU SUPP

TESTIMONY

FTI?

promoted to primary on xl and waiver

many mtg pruitt COS jackson, ryan

QUIT TRUMP TRANS BC NO GIVE UP LOBBYING

Resignations

Mike Rogers, former House Intelligence Committee Chair: Rogers resigned from the transition team on November 15, 2016. He helped to guide the transition's work in national security issues.[1]

Michael Catanzaro, lobbyist at CGCN: Catanzaro resigned from the transition team on November 21, 2016, after the incoming administration required lobbyists to terminate all existing lobbying contracts.[2] Catanzaro had been an energy independence advisor.[3]

Michael Torrey, owner of Michael Torrey Associates: Torrey resigned from the transition team on November 21, 2016, after the incoming administration required lobbyists to terminate all existing lobbying contracts.[2] He had been an agriculture advisor.[4]

Michael McKenna, lobbyist with MWR Strategies: McKenna resigned from the transition team on November 21, 2016, after the incoming administration required lobbyists to terminate all existing lobbying contracts.[2] He had been an energy advisor.[4]

nyer 2016

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/aftermath-sixteen-writers-on-trumps-america

...Many of Trump’s transition-team members are the corporate insiders he vowed to disempower. On Friday, Vice-President-elect Mike Pence, the new transition-team chair, announced that Marc Short, who until recently ran Freedom Partners, the Kochs’ political-donors group, would serve as a “senior adviser.” The influence of the Kochs and their allies is particularly clear in the areas of energy and the environment. The few remarks Trump made on these issues during the campaign reflected the fondest hopes of the oil, gas, and coal producers. He vowed to withdraw from the international climate treaty negotiated last year in Paris, remove regulations that curb carbon emissions, legalize oil drilling and mining on federal lands and in seas, approve the Keystone XL pipeline, and weaken the Environmental Protection Agency.

For policy and personnel advice regarding the Department of Energy, Trump is relying onMichael McKenna, the president of the lobbying firm MWR Strategies. McKenna’s clients include Koch Companies Public Sector, a division of Koch Industries. According to Politico, McKenna also has ties to the American Energy Alliance and its affiliate, the Institute for Energy Research. These nonprofit groups purport to be grassroots organizations, but they run ads advocating corporate-friendly energy policies, without disclosing their financial backers. In 2012, Freedom Partners gave $1.5 million to the American Energy Alliance.

Michael Catanzaro, a partner at the lobbying firm CGCN Group, is the head of Trump’s energy transition team, and has been mentioned as a possible energy czar. Among his clients are Koch Industries and Devon Energy Corporation, a gas-and-oil company that has made a fortune from vertical drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Another widely discussed candidate is Harold Hamm, the billionaire founder of the shale-oil company Continental Resources, who is a major contributor to the Kochs’ fund-raising network. Wenona Hauter, of Food and Water Watch, says that Hamm has “done all he can to subvert the existing rules and regulations.”

Myron Ebell, an outspoken climate-change skeptic, heads Trump’s transition team for the E.P.A. Ebell runs the energy-and-environmental program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an anti-regulatory Washington think tank that hides its sources of financial support but has been funded by fossil-fuel companies, including Exxon-Mobil and Koch Industries.

David Schnare, a self-described “free-market environmentalist” who has accused the E.P.A. of having “blood on its hands,” is a member of the E.P.A. working group. Schnare is the director of the Center for Energy and the Environment at the Thomas Jefferson Institute, part of a nationwide consortium of anti-government, pro-industry think tanks. He is also the general counsel at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, which has received funding from coal companies. In 2011, Schnare started hounding the climate scientist Michael Mann, who had been a professor at the University of Virginia, by filing public-records requests demanding to see his unpublished research and his private e-mails. The legal wrangling tied up Mann’s work until 2014, when the Virginia Supreme Court ordered Schnare to desist. The Union of Concerned Scientists has described these actions against climate scientists as “harassment.

...

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ggl 8 26

GOP lobbyist hangs a shingle

Politico

https://www.politico.com › newsletters › 2025/07/30

Jul 30, 2025 — Mike Rogers alum. — While Rinaldo's firm doesn't lobby, its clients have included the Open RAN Policy Coalition and Tarana Wireless, and ...Read more

AI Overview

+4

Michael Catanzaro, Mike Rogers, and Diane Rinaldo (associated via Peake Advisors) are all interconnected figures tied to Washington, D.C. energy/telecom policy, lobbying circles, and transitions from the Mike Rogers / congressional alumni networks. [1, 2]

Key Connections

Michael Catanzaro, Mike Rogers, and Diane Rinaldo (associated via Peake Advisors) are all interconnected figures tied to Washington, D.C. energy/telecom policy, lobbying circles, and transitions from the Mike Rogers / congressional alumni networks. Politico +2

Key Connections

NPR

See Who Is On Donald Trump's Transition Team ... - NPR

Nov 16, 2016 — Mike Rogers was originally slated to lead the National Security transition team. However, in a statement released Tuesday, he said...

Politico

GOP lobbyist hangs a shingle - POLITICO

Jul 30, 2025 — — Peake Advisors is run by Diane Rinaldo, who served as acting administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Ad...

Ballotpedia

Donald Trump presidential transition team resignations ...

Mike Rogers, former House Intelligence Committee Chair: Rogers resigned from the transition team on November 15, 2016. He helped t...

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-energy/trump-energy-aide-catanzaro-heads-back-to-lobbying-firm-idUSKBN1HO2WO

no lnx

ENVIRONMENT

APRIL 17, 2018

Trump energy aide Catanzaro heads back to lobbying firm

By Timothy Gardner

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump’s top aide on domestic energy issues, including biofuels quotas and scrapping Obama-era rules on car and power plant carbon emissions, is stepping down to return to the lobbying practice he left last year, a White House official said on Tuesday.

Mike Catanzaro, who has worked in the Washington energy and politics arena for at least 15 years, became special assistant to President Donald Trump for domestic energy and environmental policy in February 2017, a role within the National Economic Council.

He will be replaced by Francis Brooke, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence, who will start on April 30, the official said.

Catanzaro previously served in the U.S. Senate, the Environmental Protection Agency, and in the White House under President George W. Bush. Under Trump, he worked at the White House with George David Banks, who handled international energy and environmental issues such as the president’s plan to leave the 2015 Paris climate accord.

Catanzaro, whose move was first reported by E&E News, joins other economics officials who have recently left the White House after a chaotic year. Banks resigned in February because of difficulties getting security clearance. Gary Cohn, who was Trump’s top economic adviser, resigned last month.

Larry Kudlow, Cohn’s replacement, said in a release that Catanzaro’s dedication to Trump’s energy priorities was “greatly valued and he will be missed.”

Catanzaro will return to CGCN Group, an advocacy and public relations company, as a consultant and adviser. Previously he worked at CGCN for clients who pushed Washington to lift a 40-year-old ban on oil exports as shale drilling led to explosive growth in crude output. Congress killed the ban in late 2015 after President Barack Obama’s administration had allowed exports of some light oil.

CGCN managing partner Steve Clark said in a statement that Catanzaro’s White House experience “will be an invaluable resource” to clients and that the firm will make sure he complies with all relevant ethics guidelines.

Days after taking office in 2017, Trump, who promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington, signed an executive order that said his appointees would refrain from lobbying their own agency for five years after leaving, although there is no criminal penalty for doing so.

The White House aide also said Catanzaro will abide by all ethics rules that apply to lobbying the administration.

Under Pence, Brooke has had a low profile. Last year he moderated a panel at U.N. climate talks on how fossil fuels and nuclear power will be part of the energy future.

Reporting by Timothy Gardner; editing by Susan Thomas and Tom Brown

12/16

no lnx

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/trump-doe-transition-team-lobbyist-oil-gas-koch

POLICY

Trump Energy Team Swaps Out Its Transition Team Leader

And the new guy has some choice words for clean energy lobbyists.

JULIAN SPECTORDECEMBER 01, 2016

Donald Trump won the presidency with a pledge to "drain the swamp," reducing the undue influence of elites and Beltway insiders on the functioning of the government.

To uphold this pledge, the incoming administration instituted a policy that bars registered lobbyists from participating in the teams that land in the federal departments to oversee the transition. That made things a little awkward for the lobbyists Trump had chosen months before to run the energy policy handoff.

"Although I have reluctantly decided that I cannot continue on the transition in an official capacity, I am excited about continuing to work to make America great again," said Mike McKenna, the Republican energy lobbyist who led the transition team for the Department of Energy, in a statement earlier this month.

Another lobbyist on Trump's energy policy team, Mike Catanzaro of CGCN Group, also stepped down. The departures turned the routine process of bureaucratic stewardship into a rather more suspenseful and unpredictable affair.

https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change-trump-science-2571740964.html

White House Considered Ignoring Climate Science, Internal Memo Reveals

The Trump administration debated whether it should attack or simply ignore federal research on climate change,the Washington Post reported Wednesday.

A memo obtained by the Post written last September by former top White House energy and environmental aide Michael Catanzaro presented three pathways for the administration to approach climate science. The menu of options: conducting a red team/blue team exercise to "highlight uncertainties"; using the Administrative Procedure Act to formally attack scientific findings; or "ignor[ing], and not seek[ing] to characterize or question, the science being conducted by federal agencies and outside entities." The memo did not present an option for endorsing federal climate science.

As reported by the Post, the document "highlights the dilemma the administration has faced over climate change since Trump took office. Even as Trump's deputies have worked methodically to uproot policies aimed at curbing the nation's carbon output, the administration's agencies continue to produce reports showing that climate change is happening, is human-driven and is a threat to the United States."

"The scientific evidence about accelerating effects of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is so strong, and so prevalent, that it would be impossible to hush it up even if you wanted to," said Rush Holt, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in a phone interview with the Post. "Coraldeaths and glacier melting and sea-level rise, and all of these things are just so well documented and there's just new evidence every day, whether it's from USGS, or [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], or NASA, or Department of Energy, or various academic institutions. It just can't be swept under the rug."

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https://www.desmogblog.com/mike-catanzaro

update

April 2018

Catanzaro stepped down from his position as a special assistant to the president for domestic energy and environmental policy, **The Washington Examiner**reported. [53]

“In just a short time on the job, I realized Mike was an integral member of the [National Economic Council] team and played an important role in crafting domestic energy and environmental policy,” said Larry Kudlow, the National Economic Council director. “His expertise and dedication to the Trump administration’s energy independence priorities was greatly valued and he will be missed. We thank him for his leadership and we wish him well on his future endeavors.” [53]

Francis Brooke CAT? will be replaced by Francis Broooke, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence. The Examiner noted that Catanzaro had been instrumental in starting the process to appeal the Obama administrations Clean Power Plan and Waters of the United States rules during his time working for the Trump administration. [53]

E&E News reported that Catanzaro had been among those who opposed Scott Pruitt's “red team, blue team” climate change debate, making his departure increase the likelihood of such a debate occurring in the future. [54]

It's now up in the air again,” said**Myron Ebell**of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. [54]

April 2017

Just weeks before becoming Donald Trump's White House energy adviser, Catanzaro was :{paid by TransCanada to lobby for the Keystone XL pipelin:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}::{e:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:, DeSmog reported.[51]

Lobbying for CGCN Group, disclosure forms reviewed by DeSmog revealed that a team of lobbyists including Catanzaro advocated for “Policy issues and executive branch approval of the Keystone pipeline.” TransCanada paid Catanzaro and the CGCN team $90,000 for their work during the first quarter of 2017.[52]

During the first quarter of 2017 before taking the Trump administration job, Catanzaro also lobbied on behalf of oil and gas industry companies such as Encana, Devon Energy, and NobleEnergy, and American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers according to lobbying disclosures. [51]

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 Francis Brooke, a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence repLaced at paris/bonn f/u

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https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060079491

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/04/25/trump-mike-catanzaro-lobbying-keystone-xl

Just weeks before being hired as President Donald Trump's top White House energy adviser, Mike Catanzaro was paid by TransCanada to advocate for the Keystone XL pipeline.

Lobbying for his old employer, CGCN Group, disclosure forms reviewed by DeSmog reveal that a team of lobbyists including Catanzaro advocated for “Policy issues and executive branch approval of the Keystone pipeline.”TransCanada paid Catanzaro and the CGCN team $90,000 for their work during the first quarter of 2017. The Trump administration recently gave the Canadian energy company the green light to build the long-contested cross-border pipeline, which will carry tar sands from Alberta, Canada, to Cushing, Oklahoma.

During the first quarter of 2017 before taking the Trump administration job, Catanzaro also lobbied on behalf of oil and gas industry companies such as Encana, Devon Energy, NobleEnergy, and American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers(AFPM). Catanzaro, as The New York Times reported, is now working on many of the same issues for the federal government which were the subject of his lobbying efforts at CGCN Group.

Credit: U.S. House Office of the Clerk]

In the lobbyist update section of the disclosure form, CGCN describes Catanzaro as someone “who is no longer expected to act as a lobbyist for the client,” signifying he would soon be departing to work in the Trump White House. Many of the same individuals who in the past have passed through the Republican government-industry revolving door, as previously reported by DeSmog, are now replacing their Democratic Party counterparts who lobbied for Keystone XL during the Obama era.

Joining Catanzaro in lobbying for Keystone XL at CGCN were his colleagues Steve Clark, Gary Lytle, Sam Geduldig,Mike Nielsen, Jay Cranford, Doug Schwartz, John Stipicevic, Amy Wren, Juliane Sullivan, and Katie Mitchell. That list includes eight out of 14 lobbyists employed by the firm.

All of them except for Lytle and Clark, the lobbying disclosure form points out, formerly worked for Republican Party congressional members. Wren and Cranford formerly worked for the George W. Bush administration. Stipicevic departed from his job working for House Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Meanwhile, Alex Oehler, another former GOP congressional staffer, now lobbies in-house for TransCanada and also advocates for Keystone XL.

“Catanzaro’s appointment as a key Trump administration energy and climate adviser so soon after he served as a fossil fuel lobbyist is an outrageous conflict of interest,” said Tyson Slocum, energy program director for Public Citizen, a progressive consumer rights nonprofit. “Far from draining the swamp, Trump’s promotion of an inside-the-Beltway lobbyist to run national energy policy smacks of special interest giveaways for well-connected corporations.”

MEMORANDUM FOR MICHAEL CATANZARO, SPECIAL ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FROM: Counsel to the President

SUBJECT: Waiver Certification Under Section 3 of Executive Order 13770 for Ethics Pledge Paragraph 7 Pursuant to section 3 of Executive Order 13770, “Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Employees,” (“Ethics Pledge”), I am issuing for you this memorandum to provide a limited waiver to the restrictions found in paragraph 7 of the Ethics Pledge. This limited waiver authorizes you from the date of your appointment to participate in broad policy matters and particular matters of general applicability relating to energy and environmental policy issues, including but not limited to the following: the Clean Power Plan, the Waters of the United States rule, methane regulations covering oil, the National Ambient Air Quality Standards program under the Clean Air Act and the gas sector and the Renewable Fuel Standard (the “covered matters”), notwithstanding the limitations found in paragraph 7 of the Ethics Pledge. In addition to other restrictions found in theEthics Pledge, paragraph 7 of the Ethics Pledge prohibits all appointees, including commissioned officers, who were registered lobbyists within the 2 years before the date of their appointment, from:

• Participating in any particular matter on which they lobbied within the 2 years before the date of appointment;

or • Participating in the specific issue area in which that particular matter falls. After careful consideration, I have determined that it is appropriate and in the public interest to provide a limited waiver of the restrictions in section 1, paragraph 7, of the Executive Order for covered matters. The Administration has an interest in you working on covered matters due to your experience and expertise on these issues. It is important that you participate in covered matters, and disqualification from such matters would limit the ability of the White House Office to effectively carry out its duties. This limited waiver does not affect the application of any other provision of law, including any other provision of the Ethics Pledge; the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Executive Branch Employees (5 C.F.R. part 2635); the criminal bribery, graft and conflict of interest statutes (18 U.S.C. 201-209); or the Hatch Act (5 U.S.C. 7323), and is limited to the covered matters

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lipton nyt

...

Rolling Back Clean Power

But some cases that The Times examined could be violating this requirement or working around it using waivers. Mr. Catanzaro was registered for Talen Energy on the Clean Power Plan in 2015, yet he has worked in recent months as a senior member of the White House’s National Economic Council trying to roll back that rule, adopted by the Obama administration.

Mr. Catanzaro’s former clients, such as Talen and Devon Energy, have an enormous amount at stake in the regulations the White House is preparing to reverse — with his help. Talen, for example, helps operate the Colstrip power plant in Montana, the second-largest coal-burning plant west of the Mississippi. Federal officials have estimated that the plant could face a$1.2 billion bill as it makes updates to meet the new environmental standards, assuming it is not just closed.

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Three industry lobbyists interviewed by The Times said that they recently had confidential conversations with Mr. Catanzaro about some of the same regulatory matters on which he was lobbying the federal government. And Mr. Catanzaro gave a briefing to reporters in March at the White House in which he discussed energy topics at length, including the details related to the executive order Mr. Trump signed on March 28 to weaken the Clean Power Plan.

“It’s certainly true that there a lot of different forces that conspire to affect the coal industry, the gas industry, a lot of industries,” Mr. Catanzaro said at a White House briefing last month in which he spoke with the understanding that journalists would not identify him in their reports. (The Times independently confirmed that Mr. Catanzaro made these remarks.) “Certainly government policy has a role,” he said. “So to the extent the president can have a beneficial effect on that policy, he’s going to take it.”

Mr. Catanzaro did not respond to emails and phone calls requesting comment. And White House officials would not say whether he had been granted a waiver allowing him to be involved in the same matter he handled as a lobbyist....

https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/02/08/trump-mike-catanzaro-energy-aide-lobbyist-climate-denier

https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/02/08/trump-mike-catanzaro-energy-aide-lobbyist-climate-denier

GreenWire has reported that climate change denier Mike Catanzaro — a lobbyist for oil and gas companies Noble Energy, Devon Energy, Encana Oil and Gas,  American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), and Hess Corporation — will soon become a top energy policy aide for President Donald Trump. 

Catanzaro's lobbying disclosure forms for quarter four of 2016 serve as a potential preview of energy policy to come from the Trump White House. During that quarter, Catanzaro lobbied against U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) methane regulations, against U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement offshore drilling regulations, and for oil and gas development on U.S. public lands.

As DeSmog has reported, Catanzaro served as a top energy aide during Trump's presidential campaign. According to GreenWire, he is expected to serve as special assistant to Trump for energy and environmental issues under the umbrella of the White House National Economic Council.

His activities will include “implementing the president's domestic energy and environment agenda and kind of managing the inter-agency process that deals with those issues,” a source close to the Trump administration told GreenWire. “This is likely to be the most influential domestic energy policy position within the White House [and] will comfort industry and conservatives who view him as a champion for free-market energy and environment policy.”

Catanzaro and the White House press team did not respond to a request for comment.

Path to the Trump White House

Catanzaro began his political career as a staffer for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which was then chaired by Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the Senate's most prominent climate change denier. During this time, Catanzaro also landed a job as Deputy Policy Director for the 2004 Bush-Cheney presidential campaign.

After transitioning into positions for the George W. Bush White House first as Associate Director for Policy for the Council on Environmental Quality and then Associate Deputy Administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Catanzaro became a lobbyist for the electric utilities company Pennsylvania Power and Light.

He then swung through the government-industry revolving door, working as Deputy Minority Staff Director of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee under the watch of Inhofe.

After serving two and a half years under Inhofe, Catanzaro then landed a job for the next year and half working for then-Speaker of the House, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), serving as Boehner's top policy aide. Ever since, Catanzaro has worked as a lobbyist, with a client list featuring the likes of Koch Industries, America's Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA), and Halliburton, in addition to his current clients.

Before his present job as a lobbyist for CGCN Group and after leaving Boehner's office, Catanzaro spent two years working as a managing director for FTI Consulting. FTI runs Energy in Depth, a front group funded by the oil and gas industry. Born during the rise of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in the U.S., Energy in Depth was created to fend off criticism from the media, grassroots activists, environmental groups, scientists, and others.

Climate Change Denier

While working for Inhofe from 2003-2005, he wrote several articles for the conservative website Human Events which conveyed a climate science denial posture. His articles had titles such as “Glaciers, ‘Global Warming,’ and NY Times Hysteria,” “Be Afraid!!! Global Warming and Malaria,” “More LeftistEnviro ScareTactics,” and “No Global Warming Consensus.”

Catanzaro, formerly an assistant editor with Human Events before beginning his political career, has written that “there is no connection between global warming and extreme weather,” as well as “when it comes to the science of global warming, the alarmists, of course, think all the complexities and uncertainties have been settled.”

Further, Catanzaro's name appears as the press contact for a 12,000-word floor speech given by Inhofe in 2003, in which the senator said, “Much of the debate over global warming is predicated on fear, rather than science,” and “I have offered compelling evidence that catastrophic global warming is a hoax.”

Devon's First Victory

Catanzaro and his fellow lobbyists recently scored a victory on behalf of the Oklahoma City-based fracking giant Devon Energy when the U.S. House of Representatives voted to nix the Obama administration's regulations on flaring methane during oil and gas drilling on BLM public lands. Larry Nichols, Devon co-founder and Board of Directors Chairman Emeritus, served as a Trump presidential campaign energy adviser and campaign donor.

Oklahoma Attorney General and EPA administrator nominee Scott Pruitt submitted a letter to the EPA in 2011, which was actually ghostwritten by Devon, calling for the EPA to halt its proposed regulations on methane at U.S. fracking sites. In November 2016 Nichols' name was floated as a potential U.S. Secretary of Energy nominee.

Flaring is the process of burning off excess natural gas at oil and gas drilling sites, which is so prevalent in the U.S. that the flare fires are visible from satellites in outer space. A recent study published by the journal Nature concluded that flaring wastes 3.5 percent of the world's natural gas.

Trump ran on an anti-regulations campaign platform for his energy policy and his White House website features a section titled “America First Energy Plan,” which promotes increased fracking and staving off “burdensome regulations on our energy industry.”

By adding such a prominent oil and gas industry lobbyist to his energy policy team, it looks like Trump is following through.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-horn/koch-industries-and-frack_b_12342468.html

Texas-based Noble Energy said it is set to begin developing Israel’s massive offshore Leviathan gas field.

The first phase of the project will begin immediately, the company said in a statement issued on Feb. 23. Noble Energy said it expects the first gas to flow in 2019.

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But the Trump transition team is a who’s who of influence peddlers, including: energy adviser Michael Catanzaro, a**lobbyist**for Koch Industriesand the Walt Disney Company; adviser Eric Ueland, a Senate Republican staffer who previously lobbied for Goldman Sachs; and Transition General Counsel William Palatucci, an attorney in New Jersey whose lobbying firm represents Aetna and Verizon. Rick Holt, Christine Ciccone, Rich Bagger, and Mike Ferguson are among the other corporate lobbyists helping to manage the transition effort.

...

slew of Obama administration policies on fossil fuels are expected to be reversed after Trump is sworn into office on Jan. 20. Eliminating these regulations — which limit carbon emissions on power plants and restrict oil, gas and coal extraction — would represent major gains for the industry.

At a rally Tuesday night in West Allis, Wis., Trump vowed to “eliminate all wasteful job-killing regulations. On energy, we will cancel the restrictions on the production of American energy, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean beautiful coal.”

Oil and gas favorites have been nominated to lead the Cabinet agencies that regulate the industry: former Texas governor Rick Perry as energy secretary, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as EPA administrator and Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) as interior secretary.

Energy executives are advising Trump in more informal ways, including Harold Hamm, a billionaire who heads the major oil producer Continental Resources, and Carl Icahn, a billionaire investor who owns a pair of oil refineries. Both men are friends of Trump’s and helped him devise energy and economic policies during the campaign.

[From Icahn’s lips to Trump’s economic policy plan (at least the first version)]

Other industry officials and allies, who have been sidelined and stigmatized during the Obama years, are working on Trump’s transition team to shape the next administration’s agenda and look to enjoy ready access to the Republican White House.

Here’s a look at Trump’s administration so far

View Photos The men and women the president-elect has selected for his Cabinet and White House team.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats plan to use whatever power they have in the minority of both chambers to serve as an aggressive check on the executive branch’s power, especially on energy and environmental policies.

Incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Trump “is rigging the Cabinet top to bottom with allies of the oil industry.”

“It’s pretty clear that the bottom line of oil companies is going to take precedence over clean air and water protections for American families,” Schumer said in an email. “We’re going to fight hard to make sure that the Senate is a bulwark against those who want to undo environmental protections next year.”

Trump transition officials did not respond to several requests for comment.

While Trump’s energy and environment picks have already come under sharp criticism from the left, Ben Bulis, president of the American Fly Fishing Trade Association, said he was hopeful Zinke would compromise when it comes to wildlife protection.

“He’s going to come with a balanced approach to it,” Bulis said. “As an industry, we’re not opposed to responsible oil and gas development.”

Registered lobbyists are banned from serving on Trump’s transition team, but some energy lobbyists are serving as informal liaisons between transition staffers and the industry.

For instance, Michael McKenna — a lobbyist who represents the utility giant Southern Co. — recently accompanied the head of Trump’s Energy Department transition team, Thomas Pyle, to an official meeting on the nation’s security grid with representatives from President Obama’s Energy Department and utility executives.

McKenna, who had to quit Trump’s transition team because he did not want to relinquish his lobbying work, said he made a brief appearance at Washington’s Mandarin Oriental hotel, where the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council was meeting Nov. 29, to introduce Pyle to Southern’s chief executive, Thomas A. Fanning. After doing so, he left, he said.

Pyle is not a paid lobbyist, but he once was one for Koch Industries, the oil and gas company owned by Charles and David Koch, who have funded a wide array of libertarian groups and think tanks. Pyle also has worked for American Energy Alliance and its sister group, the Institute for Energy Research, both with strong ties to the oil industry.

[Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump]

Paul Bledsoe, an energy consultant who served as a climate change adviser in the Clinton White House, said the permeation of “big oil” in the emerging Trump administration reflects the president-elect’s vision of geo­politics.

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“Trump seems to view fossil fuels as at the center of U.S. economic power at home and abroad, providing cheap energy for the dream of increased domestic manufacturing and also lucrative export markets for U.S. oil, natural gas and coal,” Bledsoe said. “Overseas, he appears stuck in a ’70s-era world view of oil and gas power plays, where flows of energy are the key to global geo­politics — perhaps because Russia and other traditional foes are so dependent on oil and gas revenues.”

Trump’s posture represents a turnabout from the Obama years, when fossil fuel industries and the White House navigated tense relations.

While it is not clear whether these policies can revive the sagging U.S. industry, which faces significant global market pressures, it could boost domestic energy production broadly and translate into higher carbon emissions.

Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said it was not just a matter of policy. It was, he said in his own energy-centric state of the union talk in January, because the Obama administration “continues to adhere to last century’s thinking that pits increased energy production against climate goals.” Obama, he said, had a “tendency to place ideology over experience.”

Yet the oil and gas industry fared reasonably well. Obama did not move to curtail shale oil and gas drilling and lifted the 40-year-old oil export ban. And industry executives have had ready entree. Tillerson, for example, met with half a dozen or more of the most senior White House officials early in the administration, and he continued to meet others later.

The energy industry has ambitious plans to overhaul energy and environmental policies almost immediately after Trump’s inauguration.

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Pyle mapped out an agenda that he described as “a big change” in a Nov. 15 email to supporters, which was obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy. In it, Pyle predicted that the Trump administration would withdraw from or stop participating in the Paris climate accord, lease more federal lands for drilling, lift the moratorium on coal leases on federal lands, push a “reset” button on the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan for reducing carbon dioxide emissions and give states greater say in managing federal lands.

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Pyle’s note also said the new administration would stop using the “social cost of carbon,” a method the EPA uses in calculating the cost and benefits of climate change. It added that Trump’s government would relitigate the 2007 Supreme Court ruling that carbon dioxide was a pollutant under the Clean Air Act and that the EPA was obligated to regulate it as a result.

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Michael Catanzaro, a lobbyist with CGCN Group who had recused himself from the Trump DOE transition team, recently spoke on behalf of the transition at a meeting in Washington of the Edison Electric Institute, the utility industry’s main trade group.

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During that session, Catanzaro identified himself as a member of Trump’s “policy implementation team” and outlined some of the legal tools the new administration would use to undo Obama policies, according to multiple individuals who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was private. Catanzaro said the incoming administration has a “100-day plan” and “200-day plan” to roll back policies, including the Clean Power Plan and social cost of carbon.

Catanzaro could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

In the final months of Obama’s presidency, his administration has finalized several rules designed to bolster and protect his environmental legacy. They include an Interior Department restriction on the flaring of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, during oil and gas operations on federal land. The department also issued a five-year leasing plan that bars drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off Alaska, as well as in waters off the southeast Atlantic coast.

And the Army Corps of Engineers recently denied Energy Transfer Partners — on whose board Perry sits — a crucial permit to complete the controversial Dakota Access pipeline on the Great Plains....

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2016/10/04/koch-fracking-climate-denier-mike-catanzaro-trump-energy-team

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-horn/koch-industries-and-frack_b_12342468.html

The Washington Post has reported that Mike Catanzaro, a former senior energy staffer for Republican Party House Majority Leader John Boehner with a track record of climate change denial, will lead Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump's energy transition team.

Catanzaro now works as a partner at the lobbying firm CGCN, where his clients include Noble Energy, Koch Industries, EnCana Oil and Gas, Halliburton, Devon Energy and others. For those clients, he lobbies on issues such as pushing for more drilling on public lands on behalf of EnCana, against emissions regulations for drilling onshore and offshore wells on public lands for Hess Corporation and Devon, and for offshore drilling in Israel on behalf of Noble Energy.

Noble Energy Executive Vice President Chip Rimer, also a member of the Board of Directors for the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, recently attended a private meeting between Colorado fracking industry executives and Trump in Denver, Colorado.

Beyond oil and gas issues, Catanzaro also lobbies against President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan, which calls for regulating carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants. In a May speech, the climate change-denying Trump said he intends to “rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions including the Climate Action Plan” if elected president.

Catanzaro is not the only Devon connection to the Trump campaign: Larry Nichols, Devon co-founder and Board of Directors Chairman Emeritus, also serves as a Trump energy adviser.

The Post's story landed the same day DeSmog reported that Kathleen Hartnett-White, the climate change-denying former aide to First Lady Nancy Reagan and chairwoman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) under Republican Governor Rick Perry, is under consideration to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) if Trump assumes the White House.

DeSmog has also reported that Trump's prospective Secretary of Energy, hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) baron Harold Hamm — founder and CEO of Continental Resources — stands to gain economically from the building of TransCanada's Keystone XL Pipeline and Energy Transfer Partners' Dakota Access Pipeline.

Catanzaro: Oil-Soaked Road to Team Trump

Catanzaro's current role in heading up Trump's energy team is over a decade in the making, with a career track record soaked in oil and gas.

After a brief stint as a writer who studied at theindustry-funded right-wing National Journalism Institute, Catanzaro launched his career as a communications director for the U.S. Congress' climate change denier-in-chief, **U.S. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK**). Inhofe made waves in February 2015 bybringing a snowball onto the Senate floor as his evidence that climate change is a “hoax.”

After his time spent in Inhofe's office, Catanzaro spent the second term of the George W. Bush Administration working on energy policy issues and then serving as Associate Deputy Administrator of the EPA, while also working on Bush's 2004 presidential campaign. He then passed through the government-industry revolving door, becoming a lobbyist and director of federal relations for coal utility company Pennsylvania Power & Light for a couple years until moving back into government and working for Inhofe again on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee as Deputy Staff Director.

After Inhofe, Catanzaro got a job working as senior energy policy adviser to Rep. Boehner, where he worked for a bit less than two years. During that time he also worked on 2012 Republican Party presidential candidate Mitt Romney's campaign, heading up its EPA policy transition team. 

“Laugh Test”

Perhaps looking for a pay raise, Catanzaro left the Committee after a couple years on the job and went back to the lobbying world, securing a job at FTI Consulting.

FTI runs the fracking industry-funded front group Energy In Depth, which serves as an attack dog PR voice on behalf of the industry and helps to fend off criticism by citizens, regulators, policymakers and the media.

While employed by FTI, Catanzaro testified in Congress against the Clean Power Plan, co-authored a paper supporting the export of U.S. crude oil and advocated for weakening the Endangered Species Act.

Continuing the trend of never staying anywhere for too long, after a couple years at FTI, Catanzaro has spent the past two years working for the lobbying firm CGCN Group and as a senior fellow for the industry-funded American Council on Capital Formation (ACCF), according to his LinkedIn profile.

In 2015, Catanzaro gave a presentation noting that if a Republican wins the White House, one of the first things he will do in office is overturn incorporating climate change into National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews of proposed federal energy infrastructure projects, something called for recently by the Obama Administration.

“Trump’s anointment of Catanzaro to head his energy transition team, if elected, doesn’t pass the laugh test. As someone who has spent his entire career shilling for the dirty energy industry, it’s hard to imagine anyone more compromised,” Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food and Water Action Fund, told DeSmog. “When future generations study how self-serving climate deniers gained public prominence, he will be one of the people named.”

TAGS:

Energy In Depth

James Inhofe

coal

Dakota Access

Keystone XL

hillary clinton

Continental Resources

Harold Hamm

Clean Power Plan

Barack Obama

Kathleen Hartnett White

Mike Catanzaro

Donald Trump

fracking

hydraulic fracturing

koch industries

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Apr 17, 2018 — President Donald Trump's top aide on domestic energy issues, including biofuels quotas and scrapping Obama-era rules on car and power plant ...

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Dec 2, 2016 — Some of those names, such as Catanzaro and McKenna, have dropped out ... Before joining IER and AEA, Pyle founded and ran Pyle Consulting, ...

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Feb 23, 2017 — Mike Catanzaro, President Donald Trump's recently minted top energy aide, has officially begun his first week on the job at the White House.

Uncategorized Archives - Page 8 of 10 - Koch Vs Cleanhttps://www.kochvsclean.com › category › page

Before Becoming Trump's Top Energy Aide, Mike Catanzaro Peddled Climate Change ... Last year, IER and AEA received $3 million from the Koch donor network.

Institute for Energy Research (IER) & American ... - Greenpeacehttps://www.greenpeace.org › usa › front-groups › insti...

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Missing: catanzaro ‎| Must include: catanzaro

Donald Trump's Swamp: Meet Ten Potential Energy and ...https://www.nakedcapitalism.com › 2016/12 › donald-t...

Dec 4, 2016 — Some of those names, such as Catanzaro and McKenna, have dropped out ... Before joining IER and AEA, Pyle founded and ran Pyle Consulting, ...

Meet the Obscure Group Influencing Trump's Energy Policyhttps://www.bloomberg.com › news › articles › tiny-gr...

Jan 5, 2017 — American Energy Alliance members are Trump transition advisers · Industry funded group opposes government aid to renewables.

Missing: catanzaro ‎| Must include: catanzaro

Top Trump energy adviser resigns | TheHillhttps://thehill.com › policy › energy-environment › 38...

Apr 17, 2018 — Michael Catanzaro, who has headed domestic energy and environment issues at the White House's National Economic Council (NEC), plans to leave ...

Missing: ier ‎aea