{emphasis added}Earlier this month, 15 state attorneys general filed suit against the Trump administration for what they say is the president's unlawful declaration of a national energy emergency to fast-track the deployment of oil and gas projects. Emergency permitting of the projects, they allege, circumvents much-needed review processes that protect public health and safety. Because there is no emergency, they argue, the administration has no legal authority to grant any emergency permits and the order is invalid.
The attorneys general have a point. When President Donald Trump declared this "emergency" on the first day of his term, the United States was a net exporter of oil and gas, the cost of renewables was down, and while prices were on the rise after the pandemic, there was no shortage of supply. In fact, U.S. oil and gas production was at an all-time high.
Fast forward four months, and ironically, it now appears that Trump could be creating the very shortage he sought to avoid. Although renewable energy has accounted for the large majority of the nation's new electricity supply in recent years, Trump is doing everything he can to stifle its deployment, including denying federal permits for new wind turbines, closing federal lands to new wind and solar projects, and cancelling funding from the Inflation Reduction Act.
That leaves fossil fuels, which Trump is trying mightily to promote. He's declared a policy of energy dominance—that is, he wants U.S. fossil fuel producers to dominate world markets. In pursuit of this goal, he has run roughshod over permitting laws and environmental restrictions.
All of this is bad if you care about climate change and the environment. But even if you don't, there's still ample cause for concern. Rather than creating a boom in fossil fuel production, Trump's policies are wreaking havoc. The Dow Jones index for the industry has dropped almost a hundred points since he took office and the fracking company Secretary of Energy Chris Wright used to lead has lost half of its value in that same period. Oil prices are just too low to make drilling worthwhile.
From the industry's viewpoint, Trump's economic policies have more than undone the benefits of his executive order. His tariffs have increased the price of drilling wells, constructing pipelines, and building gas export terminals. While he's trying to lower gasoline prices to please consumers, doing so would kill any incentive to drill, which is already low due to recent OPEC+ decisions. And no one wants to make long-term investments given the climate of economic uncertainty that Trump has created. Even if Trump's stewardship of the general economy does improve, the administration would still face a major problem: an expansion in production simply won't happen at current price levels, and no one wants higher consumer prices.
Add to this mess the administration being "all in" on developing A.I., which demands a huge amount of energy. In fact, one of the White House's main justifications for declaring an energy emergency was that new data centers would create an increase in electricity demand.
Every indication, then, is that we're headed for a situation that's bad from everyone's point of view. Expanding natural gas production likely won't be big enough to power a huge increase in electricity demand from new data centers. Whatever increase does take place will be environmentally harmful and will cause higher consumer prices.
In the meantime, the grid will remain underpowered and overstressed, increasing the risk of blackouts. The easiest way for Trump to escape this calamity would be to take his foot off the brakes and allow renewable energy development to meet surging power demand.
President Trump seems to have landed, in part unintentionally, on a "none of the above" energy strategy. His policies are bad for the industry, bad for the environment, and bad for consumers. And because we still don't have a good way of supplying all the power that new data centers will need, they're a threat to the reliability of the power grid.
Daniel Farber is a law professor and faculty director of the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at UC Berkeley.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
It appears that despite Trump's antipathy towards renewable energy development, we have reached the point, for a number of reasons, that it is or soon will be impossible to increase our total energy supply without relying on renewables! An added benefit would be the creation of many (probably millions) of new jobs.
But Trump is too beholden to powerful and wealthy fossil fuel industry donors and too proudly ignorant of science to change his mind about this.
