National Energy Emergency and Climate Change
Despite President Trump’s national energy emergency, the grand experiment of global climate change will proceed apace with the human race, not looking in from the outside, but with itself inside the warming test tube.
The guiding philosophy of the first Trump administration could be succinctly summarized as “undo everything Obama did.” The second Trump administration is more ambitious. Of course, the restored president has reversed a broad swath of Biden administration initiatives (see, for example Executive Order 14148). More importantly, he has laid out an ambitious new energy strategy:
- Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements, EO 14162
- Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential, EO 14153
- Temporary Withdrawal of All Areas on the Outer Continental Shelf From Offshore Wind Leasing and Review of the Federal Government’s Leasing and Permitting Practices for Wind Projects, Memorandum
- Declaring a National Energy Emergency, EO 14156
- Unleashing American Energy, EO 14154
The last of these has been discussed by my colleague Josiah Neeley. The strategy includes rolling back energy conservation and efficiency measures (surely a strange way to deal with a “national energy emergency”), withdrawing lease opportunities for the development of offshore wind resources (another oddity of this “emergency”), withdrawing incentives related to electric vehicles and associated infrastructure, incentivizing the development of crude oil and natural gas production and infrastructure, and (again, counter-intuitively) incentivizing the export of liquefied natural gas.
The declared national energy emergency came as a surprise to many energy analysts. The United States is blessed with an abundance of energy in all its forms. Remarkably, the “United States produces more crude oil than any country, ever,” and “U.S. energy production exceeded consumption by record amount in 2023.” Ramping up from essentially zero in 2016, the United States has become the world’s largest supplier of liquefied natural gas, and the U.S. is the world’s largest exporter of gasoline. Across the board, inflation-adjusted domestic energy prices have been, on average, level to down for at least the last fifteen years. So where, exactly, is the energy emergency?
Of course, there is room for improvement in the domestic energy space. It is simply wasteful to delay construction of needed energy infrastructure. We must find efficient ways to build safe, reliable nuclear power plants; surely there are lessons to be learned from the French power industry and the U.S. Navy. Natural gas pipelines are needed to move cheap and relatively clean energy from Pennsylvania to New England. Long-distance electric power transmission is essential to the development and distribution of low-carbon energy. The Trump energy agenda has pointers in these directions, and there have been bipartisan paths forward for such measures in Congress.
However, Trump’s fossil fuel-heavy energy agenda cannot be discussed without considering the future of the Earth’s climate. It is now beyond dispute that the global average temperature is increasing at an unnatural rate. What this means in terms of human life, the biosphere, and earth systems as we know them are matters for investigation. However, it would be foolish to pretend that nothing irreversibly adverse could possibly come to pass as a result of changes in atmospheric composition that are unprecedented in the 300,000-year history of homo sapiens.
We can debate the effects the Trump energy agenda will have on U.S. energy and environmental policies, fuel consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and so on. However, I suspect the biggest impact Trump will have on the trajectory of climate change is his effect on the other 194 nations of the world. For better or worse, the United States is the most closely watched nation on earth, and among the richest by any measure. If the United States decides it is not going to participate in dealing with this collective action problem, why should anyone else? It is only common sense that a country can maximize its wealth by availing itself of all options and avenues to achieve that goal.
So, why should China, India, Southeast Asia, Africa, Liechtenstein . . . sacrifice potential generators of wealth associated with fossil fuels if the mighty United States refuses to take any action that might cost it a penny? It is likely the Trump agenda, applied globally, will derail attempts to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Then, the grand experiment of global climate change will proceed apace with the human race, not looking in from the outside, but with itself inside the warming test tube.
Robert L. Kleinberg is Senior Research Scholar at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy and Senior Fellow at the Boston University Impact Measurement and Allocation Program. His principal interest is the intersection of technology and regulation.
Image: Dashu Xinganling/ Shutterstock.com.