Trump; wrong about US energy crisis

Why the Trump administration is wrong about an energy crisis in the US, according to experts

 The U.S. was breaking records for the most fossil fuels ever drilled under President Biden, Trump’s predecessor. In 2023, the Biden administration produced 12.9 million barrels per day, breaking the record set in 2019 at 12.3 million barrels, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

For the last several years, the U.S. has been the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world.

The Trump administration has been attempting to spark the idea of a looming energy crisis in the U.S., but those claims couldn’t be further from reality, according to several experts who spoke to ABC News recently.

Immediately upon taking office for his second term, President Donald Trump declared a “national energy emergency,” claiming that leasing, development, production, transportation, refining and generation capacity of energy in the U.S. is “far too inadequate” to meet the nation’s needs.

Trump’s appointees have followed suit on the political messaging.   Lee Zeldin, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, announced the agency’s spearheading of “Powering the Great American Comeback. The initiative includes a pillar to “restore American energy dominance,” which claims will lower energy bills for Americans as well as allow the country to “stop relying on energy sources from adversaries.”

But there isn’t even the slightest hint of a domestic energy crisis, especially when compared to actual crisis events that occurred in 1973, 1979 and 2022.

• “Prices for gasoline are mid-range over the last, say, 20 years,” Gregory Nemet, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin’s Energy Institute said. “There’s plenty of supply. We’re not having major electricity outages. We’re not having lines at gas stations.”
• “There’s no crisis or emergency by any conventional standard or use of the word,” Noah Kaufman, a senior researcher at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy”.

With oil prices remaining steady, the oil and gas industry may not even be incentivized to drill more, the experts said.

As of Tuesday, the price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil, the key benchmark for oil prices in the U.S., was about $66 per barrel — “not crazy-high,” Kaufman said.  “And they’re not going to increase drilling if they lose money by doing so.”

The world doesn’t need more oil, despite Trump’s suggestions that the U.S. is not producing nearly enough, the experts said. The U.S. may be the largest exporter of natural gas in the world, but global demand is falling — with countries in Europe and Asia decreasing their use of fossil fuels as renewables such as wind, solar, batteries and electric vehicles, eat away at the demand for fossil fuels.

“It’s cheaper and more energy secure for them to use renewable power,” Nemet said.

Trump’s attempts to bring oil and gas back to the forefront will set the U.S. behind compared to other G2 countries and their climate goals, experts said. China and Europe are rapidly developing renewables as their primary energy.   “We’re doing nothing like that here”.

The Trump administration is “disingenuously” using the rhetoric of an energy crisis to promote fossil fuels, speed the permitting of extraction projects and justify the bypassing of environmental reviews, David Konisky, a professor of environmental politics at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, told ABC News.

The messaging of an energy emergency is also the administration’s attempt to defend its ideological goals of deregulation and reversal of Biden-era efforts to address climate change.

A lot of the momentum for solar, wind and other clean energy sources in recent years came from tax credits and other policies in the Inflation Reduction Act, along with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, both passed during the Biden administration. Trump promised during the campaign to rescind all unspent funds from the IRA.

While there may be no shortage of fossil fuels in sight, climate scientists and international communities continue to warn of the climate consequences we are increasingly facing with the worldwide production and consumption of fossil fuels — which remains the primary cause of global heating.