While President Donald Trump has caused chaos and confusion in his first few weeks in office, he’s made one thing very clear: His administration will do everything in its power to supercharge oil and gas production.

That agenda is unwelcome news for a small lizard in West Texas.

The dunes sagebrush lizard — a tan, scaly reptile measuring just a few inches long — lives in the Permian Basin, the largest oil producing region in the country. It’s found nowhere else on Earth. The basin stretches across West Texas and southeastern New Mexico and produces, by some estimates, as much as 40 percent of US oil. It’s likely that you’ve traveled in a car or plane using fuel derived from oil in the Permian Basin.

Drilling for oil and gas, and the infrastructure that supports it, harms the dunes sagebrush lizard, according to more than two decades of research. Roads and well pads damage and fragment the reptile’s habitat, as does the process of mining sand for fracking. These activities are threatening to extinguish the lizard, which is now unable to survive across nearly half of its historic range, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, a government agency.

To stave off extinction, the Fish and Wildlife Service listed the lizard as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act last spring. The ESA is the nation’s strongest law for protecting wildlife. Under the law, it’s illegal to kill endangered animals and plants (with some exceptions) and the government is required to devise and implement a plan to revive their populations.

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Now, however, environmental advocates fear that federal protections for this lizard — which were decades in the making — are at risk. Donald Trump’s agenda for energy dominance has allied his administration with the oil industry, which has long viewed regulations to protect rare animals as a barrier to drilling. Especially when they live in oil country.

That puts this humble lizard in a tough spot. Like several other species, it has become a political wedge used to criticize and dismantle environmental regulations that most Americans support, according to environmental advocates. And over the next four years it will serve as a test — of the ESA, and how far the Trump administration is willing to go to undermine the protections it affords.

Tiny lizard vs. Big Oil

To an untrained eye, dunes sagebrush lizards look pretty generic. They’ve got prickly scales, snakelike heads, and long, spindly feet, much like other lizards.

It’s their home — and adaptations to it — that make them so unique. The lizards live in “neighborhoods” within a rare habitat comprising sand dunes and woody shrubs, where they’re known to dive, or swim, under the sand to stay cool. To breed and find food, these animals move between neighborhoods, said Lee Fitzgerald, a researcher and professor at Texas A&M University who’s been studying these lizards for more than 30 years. Oil and gas infrastructure, such as access roads and well pads, disrupts this flow by........

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