“The Only “Energy Emergency” Is the One Biden Created”, By Mark P. Mills

Trump’s executive order stresses the urgency of undoing his predecessor’s disastrous “whole of government” climate policy.

Mark P. Mills

The Only “Energy Emergency” Is the One Biden Created

Trump’s executive order stresses the urgency of undoing his predecessor’s disastrous “whole of government” climate policy.

/ Eye on the News / Politics and law, Infrastructure and energy

President Trump’s Day One executive order declaring an “energy emergency” is political hyperbole, some say, even if they agree with the general thrust. But the energy situation does present real urgency.

As for the question of the legality of the “emergency” order, we’ll have to await the inevitable challenges. Experts note that executive orders themselves are not subject to legal challenges, but the actions that flow from them can and doubtless will be.

As to why President Trump sees an emergency in energy, consider what came before. Though Joe Biden never formally declared a “climate emergency,” his administration in fact acted as if there were one. And when it comes to climate, the policy actions are nearly entirely about energy. The previous administration indeed implemented energy actions on an urgent, even emergency basis.

The Biden administration certainly delivered on its signature “whole of government” energy policy—that is to say, climate policy. It was implemented at a cost and depth of government intervention into the economy equivalent to that of World War II. Energy policies, spending, and mandates were not limited to the EPA and the Departments of Energy and Interior but were plowed into every government entity—from the Departments of Agriculture to Defense, from Transportation to Treasury, from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Bureau of Consumer Protection, and more. As the Department of Veterans Affairs proudly announced in June 2024, it had “joined more than 20 federal agencies to release its updated 2024–2027 Climate Adaptation Plan.” Make no mistake: climate actions are all euphemisms for changing how our society fuels itself.

No administration before Biden’s has been able to enact—entirely on a partisan basis, without a single vote from the opposition party—as expensive and far-reaching a piece of energy legislation as the ill-named Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. After passage, that act’s supporters and the Biden administration itself proudly hailed the IRA as the “green new deal,” the nation’s most comprehensive “climate policy” in history. Various analysts have calculated that the IRA’s real-world, total spending on energy-related projects will exceed $2 trillion. If such unproductive spending continues to roll into the economy at such a scale, it will reignite inflation and undermine the ongoing recovery from pandemic-era economic disruption.

The goals and actual effects of Biden’s climate-emergency actions were to discourage investments in conventional energy, making energy more expensive; to subsidize and mandate unreliable power plants, making grids less reliable and electricity more expensive; to discourage or even ban the purchase of conventional automobiles, making cars more expensive; to discourage or even ban gas appliances, making home life more expensive; and to discourage beef consumption, making our diets less interesting. The list goes on.

The overarching effect of the Biden era’s anti-fossil-fuel policies will be to make the U.S., in due course, more dependent on imports, and encourage the use of energy technologies (windmills, solar panels, and batteries) that require greater dependence on minerals and components largely imported from China.

Leaving aside the questions of whether climate change is in fact an “existential threat” (it is not), or whether such policies would make a difference to the planet’s climate (they would not, not least because of China’s massive expansion of coal-fired power plants), the Biden administration’s action was a de facto declaration of an energy emergency.

The urgency of undoing Biden’s energy legacy should now be obvious. The Inflation Reduction Act, its destructive policies, and its massive subsidies (with their moral hazards) still remain the law of the land.

We have evidence of what will happen if the United States continues down this road. Two major economies—the United Kingdom’s and Germany’s—are further along the same “energy transition” path that the IRA funds. While both still depend heavily on fossil fuels, they have dramatically increased their use of wind and solar. The result? No meaningful change in emissions. But the costs of energy overall, and electricity in particular, have skyrocketed and continue to rise in both nations. The vicissitudes of wind and sunlight mean that both those countries are now subject to episodic, crushing price shocks. Meteorological data show that massive, long-duration “droughts” of sunlight (cloudy days) or wind lulls can last for weeks. (The Germans even have a word for the latter phenomena, Dunkelflaute, one of which is currently underway.) When that happens, energy prices soar high enough to collapse businesses and crush citizens. The German and British economies are not only accelerating their energy poverty but are also de-industrializing due to high energy costs.

Unsurprisingly, China has not pursued this agenda of self-inflicted economic and geopolitical destruction. Indeed, China benefits enormously: Western spending on wind, solar, and battery hardware requires minerals and components for which China is the dominant supplier.

The Trump executive order’s claim that “climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation” is indisputably true, especially insofar as conventional energy businesses are concerned. And it bears noting that the overwhelming majority of all energy supplied to our society, for all purposes, continues to come from conventional fuels.

The United States is not in an energy crisis—yet. But it is clear that, if the energy policies extant in Biden’s “whole of government” strategy continue, and if the plans and unprecedented scale of destructive energy subsidies in the IRA come to pass, energy, economic, and geopolitical crises are bound to ensue. Given what that would mean for the U.S., “emergency” may be the appropriate term.

Mark P. Mills is a City Journal contributing editor, the executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics, and author of The Cloud Revolution.

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images