In July 2025, Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie announced that Gary Palmer of Alabama would take over as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment.

That subcommittee is where the House writes and rewrites the laws that keep lead out of your soil, arsenic out of your water and soot out of your lungs. It handles the Clean Air Act, chemical safety, hazardous waste and Superfund.

Here is Palmer's record on the environment, according to the League of Conservation Voters' scorecard:

• 2025: 0%. Zero pro-environment votes. Thirty-three anti-environment votes.
• Lifetime: 1%.

One percent. Over eleven years. That is the man now holding the gavel.

What the subcommittee does under his gavel

You can see the priorities in the titles of his own announcements.

In May 2026, Palmer and Guthrie announced a hearing called "Rules of the Road: Examining Legislation to Modernize the Clean Air Act's Mobile Source Requirements" — "modernize" being the word Congress uses when it means loosen.

In July 2026 they announced a subcommittee markup of seven bills "to address harmful regulations". Read that phrase again. This is the Environment Subcommittee, and the harm it has identified is regulation.

And this month, Palmer joined two colleagues in introducing three resolutions to strip California of the Clean Air Act waivers that let it set tougher limits on tailpipe pollution — Palmer's own resolution revoking California's authority to set greenhouse gas standards for cars built from 2009 on. We wrote that one up: five Republicans, seven resolutions, one goal — make the air dirtier in 17 states.

Who pays him

Palmer sits on Energy and Commerce, which writes the rules for energy companies, utilities, telecom and health insurers. His donors are drawn from exactly that list.

Per FEC-derived filings and OpenSecrets:

• Drummond Company — $33,000. Alabama's largest coal company.
• Alabama Power Company's employee PAC — the state's biggest electric utility.
• Koch, Inc.'s corporate PAC — $35,000.
• Vulcan Materials, the mining and aggregates company, and The Westervelt Company, timber and land.
• He takes more than twice what the average House member takes from energy and natural resources — $98,500 against an average of $45,647.

Less than 1% of Palmer's money comes from small grassroots donors. About 93% comes from PACs, super PACs and large donors.

What Drummond's own executive went to prison for

That $33,000 line deserves a paragraph of its own, because of what happened the last time Drummond decided an EPA cleanup was inconvenient.

To be clear at the outset: Gary Palmer was not involved in this and has never been accused of anything in it. But this is the company writing him checks, and this is what the Justice Department proved about it.

On July 23, 2018, a federal jury in Birmingham convicted Drummond Company's Vice President of Government and Regulatory Affairs, David Lynn Roberson, along with Balch & Bingham partner Joel Iverson Gilbert, of bribery, honest services wire fraud, conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy.

What they did, according to the DOJ:

• The EPA had designated part of north Birmingham — the Harriman Park, Fairmont and Collegeville neighborhoods — a Superfund site after soil sampling found elevated levels of arsenic, lead and benzo(a)pyrene.
• In September 2013, the EPA notified five companies, including Drummond-owned ABC Coke, that they could be responsible for the pollution. That finding "could have cost the company tens of millions of dollars in cleanup costs and fines."
• Gilbert and Roberson paid former state Rep. Oliver Robinson $360,000 between 2015 and 2016, routed through Robinson's nonprofit foundation, to fight the EPA's plans. Robinson's legislative district adjoined the site.
• Robinson went before Alabama's environmental commission as a state legislator and concealed that Drummond and Balch were paying him. He urged the commission to "narrow the list" of companies potentially responsible for the pollution.
• Balch's invoices to Drummond were "scrubbed of any reference to the Oliver Robinson Foundation," at Gilbert's and Roberson's request.
• Robinson also voted, from the Alabama House Rules Committee, to advance an anti-EPA resolution that Gilbert had drafted.

The U.S. Attorney's summary at the time: "This was a case about greed at the expense of too many."

The people living on that soil were the too many.

Why this matters in Alabama

The question isn't whether Palmer broke a law. He didn't. The question is what an Environment Subcommittee looks like when it's chaired by a member with a 1% lifetime environmental score, funded by the coal company, the power company and the quarry company his committee regulates.

We have the answer, in his subcommittee's own words: hearings to "modernize" the Clean Air Act, markups to address "harmful regulations," and resolutions to stop other states from setting stricter pollution limits than his donors would like.

Alabama's people breathe that. Palmer's donors don't pay for it.

And this is a recognizable species. California's James Gallagher represents Paradise — the town that burned — and environmental voters scored him 0% and put him in what they call the "Polluter Caucus." The pattern is the same: the members with the worst records seek out the seats with the most power over pollution.

Alabama's 6th District votes in a special Republican primary on August 11. Palmer is asking for a seventh term.

We deserve better.

Sources

Scores: "Gary Palmer" on the League of Conservation Voters scorecard (linked above). Bribery case: "Federal Jury Convicts Lawyer and Coal Company Executive for Bribing State Legislator" — U.S. Attorney's Office, Northern District of Alabama, July 23, 2018 (linked above). Donor figures from OpenSecrets and FEC filings (linked above). Photo: official portrait via Wikimedia Commons.