On Monday, Donald Trump jolted America out of decades of bad energy policy with the stroke of his pen.
“Climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation,” he declared in one of his myriad executive orders. “To commence the policies that will make our Nation united, fair, safe, and prosperous again . . . the United States [will] restore common sense to the Federal Government and unleash the potential of the American citizen.”
The age of climate extremism is over; the age of energy realism is upon us.
To that end, Trump has officially declared an “energy emergency.”
Democrats may point to America’s record energy output and scratch their heads. But as I write, the New England grid is burning oil — some 30% of its power generation at present — to keep the lights on during this lethal spell of single-digit cold.
We waste oil on electricity production. It’s inefficient, filthy and expensive.
Unless it’s necessary. And it is necessary because the American power grid is weak; over half of the country faces dangerous energy shortfalls over the next decade.
According to the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the United States looks to lose 60 Hoover Dams’ worth of power generation in the coming years thanks to power-plant closures, just when power demand is starting to rise. That’s the crisis.
If it weren’t functionally illegal to build natural-gas pipelines or nuclear power plants in this country, New England might experience some relief. That’s the kind of problem Trump’s executive orders are meant to solve.
Permitting tangles infrastructure projects in red tape with dubious impacts on climate or the environment.
The fires in California are a perfect example: The Golden State’s allergy to forest management stems from the dense thicket of regulations that ensnarl common-sense policies.
Wiser approaches to mitigating wildfires die of exposure in the regulatory wilderness.
This dark fact has even registered with California politicians, who have promised to lift onerous regulations so people can rebuild their homes.
Moreover, the federal government has wildly overreached into people’s everyday lives, screwing the little guy in an effort to “save the world” from climate change.
In another executive order, the 3,400-word “Unleashing American Energy,” Trump slashed the Biden EPA’s electric vehicle mandate, a coercive maneuver that sought to bully Americans into swapping their affordable internal-combustion-engine cars for pricey electric ones.
Trump also stripped out the Biden Energy Department’s attempt to ban gas appliances, yet another inflationary policy that put working people in its crosshairs.
In addition, Trump’s orders effectively killed the wind energy industry, denying it much-needed permits to build on federal land.
For decades, wind energy has survived on subsidies that distort America’s power markets.
As incoming Deputy Secretary of Energy James Danly has argued, these subsidies tell companies that building unreliable renewable-energy projects costs next to nothing, while building reliable power plants will hurt their bottom line.
Worse, these subsidies have forced reliable power plants into premature retirement, since they can’t compete with subsidized prices.
Result: a dangerous reliability crisis. New York City almost lost all gas pressure in its pipeline system during Winter Storm Elliott in 2022 due to its unstable grid.
It will take an act of Congress, of course, to repeal the lavish subsidies the Inflation Reduction Act poured into wind and solar — but Trump’s wind-killer is a good start.
None of this should be read as a dismissal of the reality of climate change but as a much-needed halt to ineffective policies that, in practice, have done nothing to solve that problem.
Both the American people and big banks see the writing on the wall. Most Americans rank climate change toward the bottom of issues they care about, and several major financial players, including CitiGroup, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo, recently quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance.
Trump’s actions reflect the consensus view of the people and the captains of finance: Vox populi, vox pecuniae, vox dei.
The coup de grâce for climate extremism: Trump’s long-promised exit from the Paris Climate Accords, a great shibboleth for Western environmental organizations.
Quitting the accords is more symbolic than anything, as they have had virtually no impact on decarbonization.
Where the accords have been effective is in determining European energy policy, leading to high prices and painful deindustrialization — as green policies transform the continent into a giant Epcot Center dedicated to its own past.
With these executive actions, Trump declared his refusal to let America join hands with its allies as they march into the gray garden of managed decline, choosing instead a future of energy-rich prosperity for the United States.
Emmet Penney is a contributing editor at Compact Magazine and runs the Nuclear Barbarians Substack.