As Donald Trump prepares for this year’s US presidential election, he continues to summarise his energy policies with one simple slogan: “Drill, baby, drill.”
The Republican candidate has laid claim to the phrase, arguing that more drilling will allow him to cut inflation and flood the country with the “liquid gold” that is oil.
However, it was Michael Steele, the US politician who served as the first African-American lieutenant governor of Maryland and chair of the Republican National Committee, who came up with the slogan back in 2008.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Steele stresses that Trump had “nothing to do” with “drill, baby, drill” – a phrase he coined to promote US independence from Middle Eastern oil.
Expressing regret that it has been taken up by the Republican challenger for the White House, Steele says that, with the rise of electric cars, today the slogan could change to “plug, baby, plug”.
Here, Carbon Brief explores the history of “drill, baby, drill”, from the Black Panther-associated slogan “burn, baby, burn” through to its status as a rallying cry for pro-fossil fuel US conservatives.
‘Drill, baby, drill’
In a recent interview with Fox News, Trump explained his plans for US fossil-fuel production if he wins November’s election, saying:
“We are going to – I used this expression, now everyone else is using it so I hate to use it, but – drill, baby, drill.”
It is a phrase that he has repeated at rallies across the nation in recent months, sticking with his preference for three-word campaign slogans.
Yet, despite Trump’s assertion, it was Steele who invented the phrase. While addressing the Republican National Convention in 2008, he told the crowd:
“Let’s reduce our dependency on foreign sources of oil, and promote oil-and-gas production at home. Let me make it very clear: Drill, baby, drill – and drill now.”
Steele tells Carbon Brief that the slogan came to him late at night, after a fit of “writer’s block”.
“Donald Trump…his BS aside, had nothing to do with ‘drill, baby drill’,” says Steele, who today is a staunch critic of the Republican presidential candidate.
Steele was met with rapturous applause at the 2008 convention. Chants of “drill, baby, drill” from the crowd even interrupted a speech by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.
This was during a period of soaring fuel prices in the US, linked to conflict in the Middle East. The government was under significant pressure to expand offshore drilling.
Later that year, the “drill, baby, drill” slogan was taken up by supporters throughout the campaign of Republican John McCain, in his unsuccessful presidential bid against Barack Obama.
It became particularly associated with Sarah Palin, the climate-sceptic Republican vice-presidential pick, who said in a debate with her Democratic challenger Joe Biden:
“The chant is ‘drill, baby, drill’. And that’s what we hear all across this country in our rallies because people are so hungry for those domestic sources of energy.”
In the years that followed, the phrase was repeated endlessly by Republican politicians, as well as in comment articles and political analysis. (It did, however, see a dip in popularity following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, with Senate Republicans stating that they had never endorsed such a phrase.)
Since then, the slogan has spread and been applied to countries from Scotland to Guyana. In recent years, it has even been used to lobby for the expansion of gas in Africa.
‘Burn, baby, burn’
Despite its runaway success, there was some initial bemusement from commentators at a slogan that appeared to have been derived from “burn, baby, burn”.
That phrase, which has since made its way into everything from disco songs to hot sauce, was originally associated with Black nationalist group the Black Panthers and particularly the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles.
It was chanted as buildings were set on fire, amid civil unrest sparked by police violence against an African-American man.
Writing shortly after the Republican National Convention in 2008, journalist Derrick Z Jackson alluded to this when he wrote in the Boston Globe:
“This 93% White gathering blithely stole from the race riots of the ’60s to lustily chant ‘drill, baby, drill’.”
‘Plug, baby, plug’
For his part, Steele tells Carbon Brief that his intention was to use a colloquial expression to “connect it to something that was very real” – namely, cutting US reliance on Middle Eastern oil. He explains his thinking at the time:
“We should look at this from a very basic point of view, let’s not overthink it. We have the capacity, we have the means. Drill, baby, drill.”
However, he expresses frustration at its adoption by Trump:
“Unfortunately, a lot of people use it…in a way that they don’t fully appreciate what the point was, and the point was the self-sufficiency of the American spirit.”
Today, the US is no longer reliant on oil from the Middle East and is, in fact, the world’s largest oil producer.
A key focus of current US energy policy is achieving independence from Chinese electric-vehicle manufacturing through measures in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). However, Trump has pledged to scrap the IRA along with other environmental measures.
Steele, who has expressed climate-sceptic views himself in the past, says that his point in 2008 was not to override environmental commitments. He says:
“It’s not just ‘drill with abandon’, it’s also the idea of drilling responsibly and understanding the impacts that we do have environmentally.”
With the growth of electric cars and other technologies in the US, he adds:
“‘Drill, baby, drill’ may at some point in the future change to…‘plug, baby, plug’. Plugging your electric car into the port…It is the idea of self-sufficiency, independence, freedom, which again is an orientation that very much is in line – well, was in line – with the old Republican party. That seems to have given way to something very different today.”
Nevertheless, Steele accepts that while he will “always be there to remind [Trump]” of where the slogan came from, it is now out of his hands:
“My only regret is that I didn’t copyright it and put it on a T-shirt.”
A shorter version of this article was first published in DeBriefed, Carbon Brief’s weekly climate newsletter, on 15 March. Subscribe for free.
The post ‘Drill, baby, drill’: The surprising history of Donald Trump’s fossil-fuel slogan appeared first on Carbon Brief.
‘Drill, baby, drill’: The surprising history of Donald Trump’s fossil-fuel slogan
Sydney, Thursday 19 March 2026 — In response to escalating attacks on gas fields in the Middle East, including Israeli strikes on Iran’s giant South Pars gas field and Iranian retaliations on gas fields in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the following lines can be attributed to Solaye Snider, Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“The targeting of gas fields across the Middle East is a perilous escalation that reinforces just how vulnerable our fossil-fuelled world really is.
“Oil and gas have long been used as tools of power and coercion by authoritarian regimes. They cause climate chaos and environmental pollution and they drive conflict and war. The energy security of every nation still hooked on gas, including Australia, is under direct threat.
“For countries that are reliant on gas imports, like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and South Korea, this crisis is just getting started. It can take months to restart a gas export facility once it is shut down, meaning the shockwaves of these strikes will be felt for a long time to come.
“It is a gross and tragic injustice that while civilians are killed and lose their homes to this escalating violence, and families struggle with a tightening cost-of-living, gas giants like Woodside and Santos have seen their share prices surge on the prospect of windfall war profits.
“We must break this cycle. Transitioning to local renewable energy is the way to protect Australian households from the inherent volatility of fossil fuels like gas.”
-ENDS-
Images available for download via the Greenpeace Media Library
Media contact: Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lkeller@greenpeace.org
Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East
Climate Change
DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Iran war fallout continues
WORK FROM HOME: The International Energy Agency has advised its member countries to take 10 steps in response to the ongoing energy crisis fuelled by the Iran war, including reducing highway speeds and encouraging people to work from home, said the Guardian. It came after retaliatory attacks between Israel and Iran continued to destroy energy infrastructure in the Middle East, causing energy prices to soar further, said Reuters.
SUPPLY DISRUPTED: The IEA also said it is prepared to make more of its member nations’ 1.4bn-barrel oil reserves available to help ease the impacts of what it called the “biggest supply disruption in the history of the oil market”, reported Bloomberg. The outlet noted that Asian countries have been hit hardest by the shortages, caused by a “near-halt” of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
EU SUMMIT: The energy crisis dominated talks at an EU leaders summit on Thursday, said Politico. Arriving at the summit, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez attacked other European leaders for using the energy crisis as an excuse to “gut climate policies”, according to the EU Observer. The Financial Times said that some European leaders have asked the European Commission to overhaul its flagship emissions trading system (ETS) by summer in response to the energy crisis.
COAL BOOST: In response to the conflict, utility companies in Asia are “boosting coal-fired power generation to cut costs and safeguard energy supply”, said Reuters. UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell told Reuters: “If there was ever a moment to accelerate that energy transition, breaking dependencies which have shackled economies, this is the time.”
Around the world
- WINDFARM WINDFALL: The Trump administration in the US is considering a nearly $1bn settlement with TotalEnergies to cancel the French energy company’s two planned windfarms off the US east coast and have it instead invest in fossil-gas infrastructure in Texas, according to documents seen by the New York Times.
- BUSINESS CLASH: Following “clashes” with the agribusiness sector, Brazil launched its new climate plan, which calls for a 49-58% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2022 levels by 2025 and includes “specific guidelines for different sectors”, reported Folha de Sao Paolo.
- SALES SLUMP: Sales of liquified petroleum gas from India’s state-run oil companies have fallen by 17% this month due to cuts in deliveries to commercial and industrial consumers “amid the widespread logistical bottlenecks triggered by the Iran war”, said the Economic Times.
- CUBAN ENERGY CRISIS: The US imposed an “effective oil blockade” on Cuba, leaving the country facing its “worst energy crisis in decades”, reported the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Chinese exports of solar panels to the island have “skyrocketed” since 2023, it added.
- RECORD HIGHS: An “unprecedented” heatwave in the western and south-western US is “shattering dozens of temperature records” and could lead to drought in California in the coming months, reported the Los Angeles Times.
- VULNERABILITY CONCERNS: Landslides that killed more than 100 people in southern Ethiopia have “renewed concerns about Ethiopia’s vulnerability to climate-related disasters”, said the Addis Standard.
1%
The percentage of England’s land surface that could be devoted to renewables by 2050, according to the long-awaited “land-use framework” released by the UK government this week and covered by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- Approaching international climate action by shifting the burden of mitigation onto higher-income countries could avoid 13.5 million premature deaths from air pollution in middle- and lower-income countries by 2050 | The Lancet Global Health
- Beavers can turn the ecosystems surrounding streams into “persistent” sinks of carbon that can sequester an order of magnitude more than non-beaver-modified ecosystems can store | Communications Earth & Environment
- Mobile-phone data from seven diverse countries during the summer heatwaves of 2022-23 showed a “widespread tendency to withdraw into homes” and an increase in out-of-home activities that can offer cooling, such as indoor retail | Environmental Research: Climate
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Carbon Brief this week published a significant update to its map of how climate change is affecting extreme weather events around the world. The map now includes 232 new extreme weather events from studies published in 2024 and 2025. Of these events, 196 were made more severe or more likely to occur by human-driven climate change, 12 were made less severe or less likely to occur and 10 had no discernible human influence. (The remaining 14 studies were inconclusive.)
Spotlight
New Zealand breaks new ground on climate litigation
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to experts about a first-of-its-kind climate lawsuit in New Zealand.
Earlier this week, representatives from two environmentally focused legal advocacy groups challenged the New Zealand government’s climate-action plan in court.
The plaintiffs argued that the measures laid out in the plan are insufficient to achieve the country’s legal obligation to hold global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.
The case could be “influential” in shaping lawsuits and rulings around the world, one legal expert not involved in the case told Carbon Brief.
Reductions vs removals
The new case contends that there are several issues regarding the New Zealand government’s response to climate change.
One of the key arguments the plaintiffs make is that New Zealand’s second emissions reduction plan, which covers the period from 2026-30, is overreliant on the use of tree-planting to achieve its targets.
When the plan was released in December 2024, it was “immediately clear that it was a pretty lacklustre plan”, Eliza Prestidge Oldfield, senior legal researcher at the Environmental Law Initiative, one of the groups behind the legal case, told Carbon Brief.
The plan called for large-scale planting of pine tree plantations, which are not native to New Zealand and have a high risk of burning. Because of this, there are concerns about how permanent any carbon removal provided by these plantations actually can be, experts told Carbon Brief.
Catherine Higham, senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment who was not involved in the case, said:
“The lawyers are arguing that there are real challenges with equating the emissions that you may be able to remove from the atmosphere through afforestation with actual emissions reductions, which are much more certain.”
‘Global dialogue’
While other climate lawsuits elsewhere in the world have also focused on the inadequacy of a government’s plan to meet its stated emissions-reduction targets, this is the first such case that addresses the role of removals head-on.
Lucy Maxwell, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, told Carbon Brief that the lawsuit “builds on a decade of climate litigation” in national, regional and international courts.
Maxwell, who was not involved in the New Zealand case, added that there is a “real global dialogue” between, not just plaintiffs, but national courts as well. She said:
“[National courts] look to common issues that have been decided in other countries. They’re not binding on that court if it’s at the national level, but they are influential.”
Given that many other countries have legal frameworks requiring their governments to create plans outlining the pathway to their long-term climate targets, Prestidge Oldfield told Carbon Brief that other jurisdictions “should be interested in these questions around the level of certainty”.
Higham noted that, even if the case is successful, addressing the plan’s shortfalls will face its own set of challenges. She told Carbon Brief:
“A lot of these decisions are political and they can be politically contentious…Those [measures] have to be put into action through legislation and that is then subject to the usual political process. So that’s where the challenge comes in.”
While she could not speculate on the outcome of the case, Prestidge Oldfield said it was “very heartening” to see that both the judge and the opposing counsel “appreciated how much of a concern climate change is globally”.
She added:
“It’s not a given that the judge would even be interested in climate change.”
Watch, read, listen
COMMON APPROACH: The Heated podcast analysed fossil-fuel advertisements and highlighted the most common deception tactics they employed.
THREAT ASSESSMENT: Mongabay mapped the potential threat that oil extraction poses to Venezuela’s ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and its coral reefs.
SALT LAKES? GREAT!: High Country News interviewed journalist Dr Caroline Tracey about her new book on saline lakes – such as Utah’s Great Salt Lake – the threats that face them and what they can teach us.
Coming up
- 23 March-2 April: Third meeting of the preparatory commission for the High Seas Treaty, New York
- 24-27 March: 64th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bangkok
- 26-29 March: 14th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization, Yaoundé, Cameroon
Pick of the jobs
- International Centre of Research for the Environment and Development (CIRAD), IPCC chapter scientist | Salary: €3,200-3,750 per month. Location: Nogent-sur-Marne, France
- Avaaz, chief of staff | Salary: Dependent on location. Location: Remote, with preferred time zones
- Green Party, social media officer | Salary: £31,592-£32,192. Location: Remote or Westminster, UK
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Around 300 scientists, civil servants, journalists and climate experts took part in the 11th annual Carbon Brief quiz on Wednesday 18 March 2026.
For the second time, this year’s quiz was hosted by Octopus Energy at its headquarters in central London.
In total, 39 teams participated – 25 teams in person and 14 teams joining via Zoom.
Competing teams reflected a wide range of climate change and energy professionals. The list included journalists, civil servants, climate campaigners, policy advisers, energy experts and scientists.
Organisations represented included: Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) in India; New Scientist; the Times; Business Green; the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources (BSEER), UCL; Verisk Maplecroft; BBC; World Weather Attribution; Grantham Institute at Imperial; DESNZ; WWF; European Climate Foundation (ECF); the ENDS Report; C40 Cities; Ricardo; Met Office; Meliore; E3G; Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI); Energy Transitions Commission; Carbon Tracker; Ember; Royal Meteorological Society; Civil Service Climate and Environment Network (CSCEN); Changing Markets Foundation; Cerulogy; Oxford Sustainable Law Programme; Université de Lausanne; University of Exeter; Centre for Environment and Sustainability, University of Surrey; UK Parliament; Skeptical Science; ECIU (Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit); Octopus Energy; DeSmog; Department for Transport and Royal School of Mines.
Teams were tested with five rounds of questions – general knowledge, policy, science and two picture rounds. (See the slideshow of the questions and answers below).
After two hours of playing, this year’s winners were announced.
Comprised of players from the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) in India, last time’s second place team, “Emissions Impossible” won the coveted Carbon Brief trophy with a total score of 76 out of 100 available points.
In joint second place, with 59 points, were the “Potato-sized nodules”, a mixed team of journalists from New Scientist, the Times and Business Green.
Sharing second place, after leading at the half-way point, were “You cannot BSEERious” from the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources at UCL.
In fourth place, with 57 points, were “Risky Quizness”, from Verisk Maplecroft.
A certificate was awarded to the BBC for the best team name, as voted for by Carbon Brief staff: “High hopes [low confidence]”.
See the full leaderboard:
All the questions and answers from this year’s quiz can be found in this PDF document.
This year’s trickiest round was picture round two, which asked teams to match the quote to the author, with an average score of 5.9 out of 20 available points.
No team correctly guessed that “Chris Funk: Drought, Flood, Fire” was the source of the quote: “How greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere is pretty straightforward. It is really important that we understand this. But almost nobody does, because it is not something that we are taught in school.”
Science was the second hardest round, earning an average score of 6.1 points out of 20.
No team correctly guessed “religious leaders” as the least trustworthy source of climate information, according to a 2025 study using public polling from seven global south countries.
The highest-scoring round was general knowledge, with an average of 13.8 out of 20 questions answered correctly.
Carbon Brief would like to thank all the teams who took part and we look forward to hosting the quiz again in the spring of 2027.
If you would like to participate in next year’s quiz, please contact us in advance at quiz AT carbonbrief DOT org.
Photos by Kerry Cleaver
The post The Carbon Brief Quiz 2026 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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