When the 119th Congress kicks off on Jan. 3, a number of new lawmakers will be sworn in in the House and Senate, including many with notable records on energy and the environment.

The incoming group includes those with business experience in energy, lawmakers with records from state legislatures and others who have made promises to prioritize their issues in Congress.

This month’s elections gave slim majorities to Republicans in the House and Senate. The exact split in the House is not yet known with a handful of races yet to be called.

Here are some of the new members to watch on energy and the environment.

Sen.-elect Jim Justice (R-W.Va.)

Justice will succeed Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat-turned-indepedent who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Manchin, a fossil fuel champion, decided not to run for another term in the increasingly conservative state, but he would have faced long odds if he had.

Justice and his family have long been in the coal business, owning numerous mining companies, though he has said he hasn’t been involved with the companies since he became governor in 2017. The companies are in the midst of litigation from the federal government, which accuses them of not paying health and safety fines, charges they are defending.

In the Senate, Justice is poised to push a pro-coal agenda, aligning with Trump’s fossil fuel priorities.

“Obama and then Biden destroyed the coal industry in the state of West Virginia and all across this country,” he said on Fox Business in July. “For anybody that believes today we can do without fossil fuels, it’s so frivolous it’s unbelievable.”

Justice beat Rep. Alex Mooney in the GOP primary for the Senate seat, and easily beat Glenn Elliott, the Democratic mayor of Wheeling, in the general election.

Sen.-elect John Curtis (R-Utah)

Curtis, currently a House member, has been House Republicans’ leading voice on climate change, and founded the Conservative Climate Caucus. He and the caucus do not advocate for or against any particular energy sources, instead focusing on the general need for action.

He won a competitive primary in July against a Trump-backed opponent, Trent Staggs, in what conservative climate advocates saw as a victory for their cause. In the general election, he easily beat Democrat Caroline Gleich, a professional skier and a climate activist.

In the primary campaign, Curtis didn’t make climate change a front-and-center priority. But he did sometimes talk about the issue, with an emphasis on the positive role he argues the oil and gas industry could play.

Curtis’ ascension to the Senate could be a boost for climate policy there amid a Republican trifecta after this month’s elections. Curtis supports keeping at least some of the Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy incentives, and is the lead sponsor of the “Providing Reliable, Objective, Verifiable Emissions Intensity and Transparency (PROVE IT) Act,” which calls on federal officials to study the carbon intensity of various major U.S. products, a potential precursor to border adjustment fees for imported goods.

He succeeds retiring Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, who was a moderate on some climate issues.

Sen.-elect Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.)

In succeeding retiring Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow, Slotkin inherits a role representing the longtime center of the U.S. auto industry, alongside fellow Democrat Sen. Gary Peters. That invariably will mean representing the industry’s concerns regarding the push for electric vehicles and other vehicle emissions issues.

EV issues came up frequently during Slotkin’s campaign against Repbublican former Rep. Mike Rogers, who argued that a push for EVs was unworkable and a gift to China.

“My opponent, multiple times, supported EV mandates, trying to pick the cars that our companies have to build and the cars that you’re going to have to buy,” Rogers said in one debate.

Slotkin argued that she doesn’t want to mandate EVs, but she wants Michigan companies to be in a good position to compete on the world stage. “No one should tell us what to buy,” she said in an ad.

Slotkin has also been an advocate for cleaning up PFAS contamination and for federal funding to keep the Great Lakes clean, both priorities she’s poised to take to the Senate.

Rep.-elect Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.)

Ansari was most recently a member of the Phoenix City Council. She was formerly an adviser to United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, in which role she worked on the Paris Agreement in 2015 and 2016.

She later returned in a similar United Nations role in 2018 and 2019. She said she decided to run for office because of Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris accord.

Ansari brought that climate advocacy to her role in Phoenix, and plans to keep it up in Congress.

“Phoenix continues to face climate catastrophes,” she said in a Congressional Progressive Caucus event.

“We had triple-digit days well into October. We’re on the front lines of record level heat, and hundreds of individuals dying each year, a quickly growing unhoused population, so there’s a lot of work to do,” she continued, boasting about her work in Phoenix on an ordinance to protect workers from extreme heat and an initiative to electrify city-owned vehicles.

She’s succeeding Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who is going to the Senate. She will also be president of the incoming freshman class.

Rep.-elect Sam Liccardo (D-Calif.)

Liccardo previously served as San Jose’s mayor and carried out a number of conservation and environment-related initiatives.

He successfully pushed for a ballot initiative in 2018 to preserve the Coyote Valley. Beyond the wildlife and open-space considerations, the initiative was seen as a way to beef up San Jose’s flood control capabilities following a major flood in 2017.

Under Liccardo, the city banned gas in all new construction. At the time of the ban’s approval in 2020, San Jose was the largest city with such an ordinance.

San Jose also launched San Jose Clean Energy under Liccardo, a community choice aggregator allowing electricity customers to buy electricity from renewable energy.

Previously, when he was on the city council, Liccardo championed a ban on the sale of single-use plastic bags.

Liccardo is succeeding retiring Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo.

Rep.-elect Luz Rivas (D-Calif.)

Rivas chairs the state Assembly’s Natural Resources Committee and has taken on priorities including protecting people from extreme heat and better educating students about climate change. She is a trained electric engineer.

She sponsored legislation that passed in 2022 to better coordinate California state resources on extreme heat across dozens of agencies and study heat events. The state released its first report called for by her legislation in 2024, finding that seven extreme heat events from 2013 to 2022 cost the state $7.7 billion and killed 460 people.

The state also passed legislation from Rivas in 2022 meant to fight plastic pollution. It put news requirements on plastic packaging producers to make sure that their products are properly recycled. It also targets a 25 percent reduction in plastic pollution by 2032.

Rep.-elect Mark Messmer (R-Ind.)

Messmer, who has served in the state Senate since 2014 and been its majority leader since 2018, has pushed pro-renewable-energy initiatives in the Legislature, and could add to the ranks of GOP clean energy advocates in Congress.

His most notable contribution was legislation passed in 2023 to create statewide standards for siting wind and solar energy projects and incentivize counties to adopt the standards themselves. It had broad support from the renewable energy sector, which has been battling a growth in local opposition to projects and has called for the process to be standardized.

The legislation originally would have given state money to counties for their projects if they adopted the new standards, but that was taken out, and only federal money can be used for the incentives, Inside Indiana Business reported. Messmer previously tried to pass the bill in 2021 but it failed.

Messmer is taking the seat being left by retiring GOP Rep. Larry Bucshon.

Rep.-elect Kristen McDonald Rivet (D-Mich.)

McDonald Rivet played a key role in the passage last year of Michigan’s landmark clean energy plan, which includes a goal to get to 100 percent clean electricity by 2040.

The legislation, signed last year by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, was a set of bills, and included McDonald Rivet’s bill that aims to make it easier for farmers to lease their land for solar energy development.

It specifically preserves agricultural conservation easement tax incentives, as long as the land owner pledges to return the land to agricultural use after the lease is up.

“This practical policy is pro-farm, pro-environment and — most importantly — it respects owners’ property rights,” she said in a statement at the time. “Farm owners needing solar as an income source should have that option without being forced to lose their heritage farmland status.”

McDonald Rivet won a competitive race in the 8th District to succeed retiring Democratic Rep. Dan Kildee, a longtime champion of the auto industry and clean drinking water. She beat Republican Paul Junge, who, like other Michigan Republicans, tried to use the Biden administration’s electric vehicle policies against his opponent.

Rep.-elect Josh Riley (D-N.Y.)

Riley won a highly competitive race, unseating incumbent GOP Rep. Marc Molinaro, in part by talking frequently about the Inflation Reduction Act at a time when the climate law was not center stage in many campaigns.

Riley, a lawyer and former Capitol Hill aide, brought up the IRA in a debate with Molinaro, saying he “voted to kill all of those investments in green energy manufacturing under the Inflation Reduction Act. That’s deeply irresponsible.” He also called for further work in Congress on a “vision” for true energy independence and applauded a battery plant in Endicott, New York.

He called out Molinaro last year for his opposition to the IRA in a post on X, and got the support of the United Auto Workers and environmental groups for his pledges to defend and expand on the IRA — something that will be difficult under a Republican government trifecta.

“Maybe it’s because he’s not from here and doesn’t fully appreciate the stakes,” Riley wrote in an opinion piece last year on Molinaro’s opposition to the IRA. “Or maybe it’s because he is bankrolled by the same Big Oil interests who will benefit the most if America stays dependent on fossil fuels instead of transitioning to the clean-energy future we’re building in Upstate New York.”

Rep.-elect Julie Fedorchak (R-N.D.)

Fedorchak has served since 2012 on North Dakota’s Public Service Commission, overseeing electric utilities, natural gas pipelines and more, and was the president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners until this month. At the PSC, she directly succeeded Republican Kevin Cramer, who went on to serve in the House and is now in the Senate.

At the PSC, Fedorchak has grappled with issues including high electricity prices, reducing blackouts and regulating refineries and coal mining.

Fedorchak recused herself this year from one of the PSC’s biggest controversies: the Summit Carbon pipeline, which would be the world’s largest carbon dioxide pipeline. The commission approved it this month, but Fedorchak didn’t participate, since her family had signed a carbon storage deal with the developer.

She succeeds GOP Rep. Kelly Armstrong, who won the race to become governor.

Rep.-elect Riley Moore (R-W.Va.)

Moore, currently West Virginia’s state treasurer, made a name for himself nationally when he made the state one of the leading opponents to environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing.

Starting in 2022, he banned major financial institutions like BlackRock and JP Morgan Chase from doing business with the state due to their ESG-focused actions. West Virginia officials determined that ESG threatens industries important to the state, like coal and natural gas.

Congressional Republicans have taken their own steps to fight ESG, with the House passing a number of bills to try to stop it this year.

Moore, the nephew of Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), sees fighting ESG as a way to promote fossil fuels. “One of the overarching objectives that I have is I’d like to not only see the United States as energy-independent, I want to see the United States as an energy superpower,” he told POLITICO’s E&E News.

He’s succeeding Republican Rep. Alex Mooney, who is resigning due to his unsuccessful campaign for Senate.