Trump Invents an Energy Emergency

Two days into Trump 2.0 - or the Felon 2.0 if one prefers - and the avalanche of lies and misrepresentations is off the charts and a flurry of executive orders are enforcing a made up reality.  A reality that rewards Trump's large donors and strokes the prejudices of the MAGA base by attacking transgender individuals, erasing LGBT protections, and promising to arrest undocumented migrants in schools and churches as if the targets were Jews being targeted by Hitler's Nazis. One invented emergency surrounds energy and Trump's effort to reward the fossil fuel industry which helped bankroll his campaign.  Truth be told - an unknown concept in MAGA world - there is no energy crisis in America and oil and gas production are at record highs.  The true emergency involves the planet's climate crisis that is worsening, yet all of the Felon's actions to date will only exacerbate the climate crisis, including the push for more oil and gas drilling, withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, and loosening regulations that seek to curb pollution and the release of carbon into the atmosphere.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at this fabricated emergency which will likely be but one of many as the Felon seeks to reward plutocrats and those who can buy his favor.  Here are excerpts: 

The misuse of power under Donald Trump is to be taken for granted. Monday ’s list of executive actions on behalf of the fossil-fuel industry was entirely expected—this time around, there is no hesitation about withdrawing from the Paris climate accord (a decision that took four months in his first term), nor about opening up new lands for drilling, nor about rolling back regulations that have encouraged the production of electric cars. In fact, consider them all promises kept—in April of 2024, in a closed-door meeting soon uncovered by the pre-traumatized Washington Post, Trump laid out the terms to industry leaders:

You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

The executives responded. A fracking king named Harold Hamm (who had originally supported Ron DeSantis in the primaries) took the lead, working the phones assiduously. “Harold can just stick his finger in the ground, and oil will come up,” an admiring Trump explained at one event. But in this case he stuck his finger in his phone and what came up was money.

As I say, no one seems to shake their head at any of that anymore. It’s corrupt, but a kind of corruption legalized by the Supreme Court, in Citizens United and other decisions; we’re beginning to take it for granted that government power will be used on behalf of the highest bidder.

Trump—a master at directing the focus where he wants it to be—also used Monday’s signing sessions to declare a “national energy emergency.” This, one aide says, will “unlock a variety of different authorities” that let him make these changes more easily—but the main effect is simply to muddy the waters. Because there is no energy emergency. America has been producing oil and gas at record levels—indeed, oil-industry players have been pointing out, in the past few weeks, that they don’t really want to see more drilling, as that would drive prices down.

This energy emergency supposedly stems from a need to provide more power to data centers, so that we can beat China in developing the grail of artificial intelligence. . . . . But—all doubts about the utility and urgency of developing A.I. aside—if this were the new Administration’s real goal it would actually want to leave fossil fuels behind. At the end of 2024, a Silicon Valley team that included researchers from Stripe, Anthropic, Tesla, and elsewhere produced a report showing that solar microgrids are by far the fastest way to build the power that data centers need. . . . . The tech is mature, the suitable parcels of land in the US Southwest are known, and this solution is likely faster than most, if not all, alternatives.”

The actual emergency, obviously, is with the climate. The past two years were the hottest ever recorded. In 2023, Canadian fires filled American skies with choking smoke; 2024 saw Hurricane Helene devastate southern Appalachia; 2025 dawned with the Los Angeles inferno.

So now we find ourselves at an Orwellian moment, almost a Seussian one. Our leader has declared a fake emergency about energy, so that we can do more of something—drilling for oil and gas—that causes the actual emergency now devastating our second most populous city. It’s entirely possible that Trump’s gambit will succeed in confusing voters, and it’s almost certain that it will confuse much of the media, which has a history of following whatever squirrel he lets out of the cage.

But it’s unlikely that he will fool the Chinese, who are building renewable energy faster than anyone. And it is almost certain he will fail to confuse the planet’s glaciers and ice caps, which will go on melting, or its forests and grasslands, which will go on burning, or its seas, which will go on rising. When we want to describe the folly of our leaders, we often invoke the example of King Canute, smiting the sea with his sceptre to hold back the waves.

Trump, of course, is delivering the opposite of that pious and humble message. He confuses attention with reality (just as Biden sometimes confused reality with attention). It’s an emergency all right.