America is one of the world’s the largest energy exporters. In terms of energy production and distribution, it’s a super power. To hear President Trump tell it, the US is weak. So weak that he was declared “National energy emergency” and is “Unleashing American Energy,” into a pair of executive orders that will have far-reaching consequences for the way the state operates.
The short version is that Trump is undoing everything Biden has done and doubling down on the right-wing meme first uttered by Sarah Palin in 2008: “Drill baby drill.”
The first thing both orders do is tell a story about the world we live in. To hear Trump tell it, America is besieged on all sides by hostile actors and is in dire need of resources. Reckless Biden has held back America’s energy independence and hurt the common man. “In an effort to harm the American people, hostile state and non-state foreign actors have targeted our domestic energy infrastructure, weaponized our reliance on foreign energy, and abused their ability to cause dramatic swings in international commodity markets,” the National Emergency states. ” read the order.
While it is true that America’s adversaries abroad often target its energy infrastructure, they are not the only ones. There is no mention in the Order multiple times in the past few years that white supremacists they tried to knock down parts of the country’s electrical grid.
“The policies of the previous administration have brought our nation into a national crisis situation, where uncertainly inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid require swift and decisive action,” the order reads. “Without an immediate solution, this situation will worsen dramatically in the near future due to the high demand for energy and natural resources to power the next generation of technology. The ability of the United States to remain at the forefront of technological innovation.”
Translation: my new friends at Meta and Amazon are building data centers that require massive amounts of energy to run and will need all the help they can get. Big Tech is coming all in nuclearit is true, but it takes a long time for nuclear energy to take off. In the short term, companies like Microsoft and Meta will demand huge amounts of traditional blowing out smoke resources to keep your services alive. Trump’s orders will make that a little easier.
The rest of the “National Energy Emergency” order gives broad “emergency” powers to various government officials with the nebulous goal of increasing America’s energy independence and exploiting its vast natural resources. The real meat of Trump’s energy policy is in the “Unleashing American Energy” mandate.
Like the “national emergency” order, the “Unleash American Energy” order is loaded with right-wing grievances. “In recent years, burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations have prevented the development of these resources, limited the production of reliable and affordable electricity, reduced the creation of new jobs and caused high energy costs to our citizens,” it opens.
The order then promises to undo the damage of the past and restore American prosperity “including those men and women our economy has forgotten in recent years. It will also restore the economic and military security of our nation, which will bring peace through strength.”
There is a long list of incoming changes that the order will bring. Here are some of the highlights.
Initially, the order outlines a plan to “repeal the ‘electric vehicle (EV) mandate’ and promote real consumer choice.” Tesla and Elon Musk have made a lot of money from tax breaks for electric vehicles, but that revenue stream will soon end and Musk’s vehicle company will have to compete on a more level playing field.
Part of the scheme will be to “remove, where appropriate, government emissions exemptions which serve to limit the sale of petrol-powered cars; and by considering ending unfair subsidies and other ill-conceived government-imposed market distortions that favor electric vehicles over other technologies and effectively mandate their purchase by individuals, private companies and government entities, making other types of vehicles unaffordable.”
The next line promises to give Americans freedom of choice when it comes to a range of consumer goods, including light bulbs, washing machines, gas stoves and toilets. This has long been a specific complaint of Trump. He often talked about how toilets these days aren’t as good as they used to be.
The incandescent light bulb ban hit the US in 2023, forcing everyone to use the widely hated LEDs. The order doesn’t say that Trump will specifically put back the old light bulbs, but that’s probably what he’s talking about here. And, of course, the order says that Americans are free to continue using gas stoves. During the Biden administration, there was panic among conservative America over bills in some states that would phase out gas stoves in favor of electric ones.
The new order listed 12 Biden-era executive orders it rescinded, including Strengthening National Forests, Communities and Local Economies, Protecting Public Health and the Environment, and Restoring Science to Address the Climate Crisis, Restoring and Improving Refugee Resettlement Programs, and Planning for the Impact of Climate Change on migrations.
The new order also eliminated the US Climate Corps. Founded in 2023, the American Climate Corps was an interagency effort to train young people for climate and energy-related jobs to help America. It didn’t start from a dead end, but the dream was for young people to help install solar panels, work with the US Forest Service to fight wildfires and other similar tasks.
Now he’s gone, killed in his crib.
The order also directs government agencies to stop paying attention to “the social cost of carbon,” way of thinking about climate change that studies the damage caused by the emission of one ton of carbon. “The calculation of the ‘social cost of carbon’ is characterized by logical flaws, a weak empirical scientific basis, politicization and a lack of foundation in legislation,” the order states. “Its abuse arbitrarily slows down regulatory decisions and, by making the United States economy internationally uncompetitive, encourages greater human impact on the environment by giving less efficient foreign energy producers a greater share of the global market for energy and natural resources.”
Government agencies have 60 days to remove the social price of carbon from any decision-making process.
And, of course, the order destroys what’s left of the Green New Deal. “All agencies will immediately halt the disbursement of funds allocated under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (Public Law 117-169) or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Public Law 117-58), including but not limited to funds for electric charging vehicles are becoming available through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program and the Discretionary Charging and Refueling Infrastructure Grants Program and will review its awarding processes, policies and programs grants, loans, contracts or any other financial disbursement of funds so awarded to comply with the law and policy set forth in Section 2 of this order,” it said.
Trump and his team really seem to hate electric vehicles.
There is more to both orders, much more. These are just highlights to give us a general idea of how America’s energy future will play out. It seems that all the old fossil fuels are up, government-backed economic incentives are gone, and America is about to be freed from the tyranny of low-flow toilets. The consequences were damning.