During his first day in office, US President Donald Trump issued a flurry of executive orders that could bolster the fossil fuel industry.
Trump Declares ‘Energy Emergency’ as
Scientists Stress Growing ‘Climate Emergency’
Kiley Price / Inside Climate News
(January 21, 2025) — Soon after he was sworn in to his second term as US president, Donald Trump issued more than two dozen executive orders that touch on nearly every facet of US policy, from immigration to national security.
Several of the directives have profound implications for the climate, promising to further ratchet up oil and gas production while slashing initiatives directed at reducing the country’s soaring greenhouse gas emissions. Though legal and congressional barriers could lie ahead, experts say Trump’s executive orders indicate a swift and aggressive departure from the climate progress seen under the Biden administration.
“Energy Emergency”
At Monday’s inauguration, addressing a crowd of politicians, tech moguls and celebrities, Trump promised that the “golden age of America begins right now.”
A large part of his plan to kickstart this era? Further tapping into what he calls the “liquid gold” hiding underground: oil and gas.
“We will drill, baby, drill,” Trump said. “America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have—the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth—and we are going to use it. We’ll use it.”
During his speech, Trump declared a “national energy emergency”—a presidential first, though his team has not yet elaborated on the specifics of what it could entail, NPR reports. He says the administration’s goal is to reduce energy costs for Americans and secure “dominance” in the space. However, as The New York Times points out, domestic oil production reached an all-time high in 2024. Natural gas prices dropped last year to their lowest annual average on record, when adjusted for inflation.
“It’s not clear what the emergency is,” Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told the Times. “The US is producing more oil and gas than ever before, more than any other country in the world, we have no gas lines, we have no widespread electricity blackouts.” He called the emergency order “mostly performative.”
At a recent Senate confirmation hearing, Trump’s choice for Interior secretary, Doug Burgum, stressed a concern over the electricity grid’s reliability in the US in the face of increasing demand from tech companies to power artificial intelligence.
“Electricity is at the brink. Our grid is at a point where it could go completely unstable,” he said. “We’ve got to get to work in permitting reform and speeding permitting right now.”
Global Impacts
Several of the executive orders targeted Biden’s past climate-related policies, with one stating that “climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.” (However, a wide body of research shows that climate change itself is worsening inflation.)
In addition to the emergency declaration, Trump issued several other energy-related executive orders, including directives to stop approvals of new wind farms on federal waters and potentially many on land, revoke much of the federal support for the sale of electric vehicles and restart reviews of new liquefied natural gas export terminals—a process that the Biden administration paused in 2024.
These orders still face potential legal challenges in courts or regulatory hurdles from Congress, which could deny funding and limit enforcement of Trump’s energy policies. Still, Congress is now in Republican control.
While fossil fuel companies are celebrating Trump’s moves, environmentalists are speaking out against his proposed expansion of oil and gas, key contributors to global warming. Last year was the hottest in recorded history.
“There is no energy emergency,” Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “There is a climate emergency.”
Trump’s flurry of executive orders also extend to international policy. He announced on Monday that the US will withdraw from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accord (again). He called the global climate treaty an “unfair, one-sided Paris climate accord rip-off.”
Though it will take a year for the Paris agreement withdrawal to become official, experts say the move could influence other world leaders to back away from their climate goals, a trend my colleague Marianne Lavelle reported on after Trump’s win in November. This shift comes as climate disasters compound around the world, including the wildfires still raging through California.
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