If there were any doubts about the policy priorities of the second Trump administration, these have been swiftly clarified after the first barrage of executive orders (EOs) aimed at deconstructing environmental, scientific, and democratic safeguards.
One of the most extensive EOs is titled “Unleashing American Energy,” which contains a wide array of actions aimed at boosting “America’s affordable and reliable energy and natural resources.” This is merely coded language for doubling down on an extractive model of development poised to pump, mine, and log every possible inch of American public lands. Unsurprisingly, it is also aimed at “unleashing” only some types of energy resources: fossil fuels.
Succinctly, the EO highlights some of the main tenets for the new president and his administration’s approach to climate, energy, and the environment: anti-climate change, pro-fossil fuel, anti-renewable energy, anti-EV, anti-energy and water efficiency, and overall anti-nature.
The EO starts with an attack at “burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations that have impeded the development of these resources.” This is a lazy fallacy on two counts.
First, it implies that the policies put forward by the previous administration were ideologically motivated, but these are not. But ideology is merely a set of ideas that permeate and shape our understanding of the social and political world, regardless of who is in power.
The second fallacy is the idea that prior regulations have impeded the development of America’s natural resources, and in particular, oil and gas. This is easily disproved by looking at the data. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the United States has been the biggest producer of oil and gas in 2022 and 2023, accounting for 20% and 22% of global production, respectively.
It’s clear that the expansion of fossil fuels was well underway during the Biden administration, regardless of the metric of interest (jobs, volume, federal drilling permits, and record profits for oil and gas companies). This does not discredit the advancements made during the last four years regarding clean energy deployment, but it highlights the contradictions of the energy transition and severely undermines the claims that the U.S. has somehow let go of its standing as a global energy superpower. This reality is not taken into account in the EO.
The EO also focuses on some issues that resonate widely with many Americans, regardless of their political orientation. A call for focusing on “those men and women who have been forgotten by our economy in recent years,” for example, is surprisingly aligned — on the surface at least — with the idea of energy communities. But this is where the similarities end: instead of focusing on how to transition to a low-carbon economy, this administration is focusing on how to double down on fossil fuel extraction.
The EO also takes aim at the permitting process, including provisions regarding the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and a long list of federal agencies, with an eye at expediting permitting and eliminating delays. This is rooted in the belief that it’s the multiplicity of burdensome regulations that impede permitting. But there is a problem with this claim: it’s not true, as the empirical evidence makes clear. There are many bigger obstacles to streamlining permitting, such as insufficient agency resources, high rates of turnover among agency personnel, lack of coordination between agencies, and others, none of which are going to be addressed by an administration that has vowed to fire a significant number of federal workers.
On this topic, the EO requires that “agencies shall use all possible authorities, including emergency authorities, to expedite the adjudication of Federal permits.” Although one could argue that this could result on a higher rate of construction of critical energy infrastructure, such as transmission lines, an excerpt of the EO calls this into question. Its stated goal of facilitating “the permitting and construction of interstate energy transportation and other critical energy infrastructure, including, but not limited to, pipelines” provides a hint on how this will be implemented when it comes to facilitating fossil fuels, electric transmission, and renewables’ deployment.
Overall, the EO signals an appetite for revoking many of the Biden administration’s priorities, including a long list of EOs related to climate and energy, environment, and scientific integrity. The executive order, in many passages, reads more like a manifesto, but it outlines the priorities of the new administration and provides a clear picture of who their allies and foes will be during the next few years.
