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energy
'The Threat Is Extremely Real': Advocates Sound Alarm Over Trump 'Energy Emergency'
"We truly urge policymakers, stakeholders, and the public to see these executive orders for what they truly are: an unnecessary and counterproductive retreat to outdated energy strategies."
Mar 19, 2025
On the first day of his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump announced he was fulfilling his campaign promise to "drill, baby, drill" by declaring a "national energy emergency." The declaration seeks to spur the "identification, leasing, development, production, transportation, refining, and generation" of every energy source except for wind, solar, battery storage, and improved efficiency.
But what exactly does this mean, and how much damage could it do to local communities, energy prices, the global climate, and the nation's leadership in the green energy transition? Quite a lot, a panel of energy policy experts warned on Wednesday.
"These executive orders and this administration are sending us down exactly the wrong path," said senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center Megan Gibson. "By attempting to fabricate a national energy emergency, these orders set the stage toward increased fossil fuel extraction, transmission, use, and export. This is all over cleaner, more affordable technologies that we have and are commercially scalable."
The National Security Justification
Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen's Energy Program, warned that "the threat is extremely real, and here right now, that Trump is going to seek to push unneeded fossil fuel projects."
Trump gave himself a major tool to accomplish this in the declaration by evoking national security. Specifically, Section 7 orders Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to conduct an assessment of the department's access to the energy needed to "protect the homeland" and present it within 60 days, or by March 21. The report should examine any vulnerabilities, with a special emphasis on the Northeast and West Coast, where local and state Democratic governments have rejected new fossil fuel projects on climate grounds.
While Trump tried to use national security justifications to speed fossil fuel development during his first term, he was stymied in part by opposition within government agencies. That is less likely to be the case now.
"There is no question that when you add national security designations to civilian energy infrastructure projects, you're putting in the crosshairs any civil servant or citizen who seeks to deviate from Trump's line."
"He has now purged agencies of opposition and has much firmer control over the national security apparatus that he's going to need to use national security justifications for this energy emergency declaration," Slocum said.
Therefore, Hegseth's report could be used to, for example, claim that the energy needs of military bases in the Northeast require the revival of the Constitution pipeline that would bring fracked gas from Pennsylvania to New York, which state leaders had previously rejected.
"This is about a larger issue of attacking parts of the country that didn't vote for him and parts of the country that also have enacted a number of laws and regulations promoting action on climate change and promoting renewables," Slocum said. "And so this is part of a general attack on state leadership of those states that he sees as not being accommodating enough to fossil fuels."
At the same time, the emergency declaration could be used as part of a negotiating tactic with Democratic state leaders. To take New York as an example again, Trump might persuade Gov. Kathy Hochul to accept the Constitution pipeline in exchange for allowing offshore wind or ending opposition to congestion pricing.
"Trump will either force his agenda upon unwilling states, or he will use it as a club to bully them into doing it as part of a horse-trading maneuver," Slocum said.
Using the national security justification could also make it easier for the administration to crack down on not only civil society protests against these projects, but stubborn opposition from local leaders as well. Even elected officials who pushed back, Slocum warned, could be labeled terrorists.
"There is no question that when you add national security designations to civilian energy infrastructure projects, you're putting in the crosshairs any civil servant or citizen who seeks to deviate from Trump's line," he said.
Cutting Corners
Another provision of the emergency declaration being monitored by advocates is Section 4, which calls on heads of agencies to alert the Army Corps of Engineers to projects they want to see prioritized. The Corps plays an important role in issuing 404 permits for any infrastructure that is built through or beneath a body of water. It also has the authority to rush its permitting process—including by waving or truncating a National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review—in the case of an emergency.
Shortly after Trump's declaration, the Army Corps listed several "emergency"-designated projects on its website. However, David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the Environmental Integrity Project, pointed out, "none of those projects, not a single one, meets the Corps' own definition of what an emergency is."
The Corps can rush a project through only if not doing so poses an immediate threat to life, property, or economic well-being, and it has historically only done so in the aftermath of natural disasters such as floods or hurricanes.
"In the long run, the question is how many times is the Corps going to make groups sue them?"
"No one has ever tried to speed up permitting on the basis of a national energy emergency, let alone a clearly fictitious one," Bookbinder said.
The Army Corps immediately removed the emergency designations of projects on its website once they were discovered, and groups including Bookbinder's have filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Corps to find out what projects other agencies have told it to fast-track. Those requests are due around the beginning of April.
"As soon as they try permitting one of these projects, cutting the corners and speeding up a permit by designating it as, quote, an emergency, that permit will be challenged," Bookbinder said. "And in the long run, the question is how many times is the Corps going to make groups sue them?"
In the long-term, advocates say, the administration may attempt to use the Corps' ability to rush "emergency" projects in order to bypass NEPA altogether, ignore court orders that try to stop it, and undermine agencies that push back. While the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is supposed to be independent, for example, Trump on Tuesday fired the two Democratic commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission.
"We are very concerned that should Trump perceive any roadblocks at FERC to his energy emergency declaration that he would have no qualms forcibly removing independent FERC commissioners from their seats and replace them with compliant commissioners," Slocum said. "So this is not bluster."
Ultimately, Slocum added, "we are in an era right now where the only norm is Trump is going to violate it."
Who Benefits?
While the Trump administration is trying to rush through fossil fuel projects, the panelists were clear that his energy agenda will not benefit the majority of U.S. communities and ratepayers.
"If we continue down this path, this self-destructive path, we will miss out on an opportunity to build a vibrant, sustainable energy economy that benefits all Americans, that will actually secure our national energy independence, and would position our country for long-term economic success," Gibson said.
So who will benefit? The clue comes in part in a closed-door meeting the Trump administration held with oil and gas executives in the White House, also on Wednesday.
"Advocates must keep challenging approvals through litigation and public pressure—making the case that the project can and should be denied if there is no genuine need or if adverse impacts are overwhelming."
"After spending $450 million in the last election to elect Trump and install friendly lawmakers on Capitol Hill, fossil fuel executives are getting what they paid for," Slocum said in a statement about the meeting. "We know precisely what the oil industry will do with decreased costs stemming from Trump's deregulation: They will pocket the savings and shower executives and wealthy investors with bonuses and dividends."
"Under Trump, fossil fuel corporations will accelerate the transfer of wealth from consumers to billionaires while exposing millions of Americans to more pollution and delaying the transition to clean energy for as long as possible," he continued.
Slocum further told Common Dreams that "the fossil fuel industry's close ties to Trump and key Trump officials will play a role in decisions Trump has made and will continue to make on the energy emergency declaration and implementation."
Gibson said the emergency declaration was "perpetuating a pattern where major fossil fuel corporations reap substantial profits while the American public and communities have to deal with rising energy prices, higher utility bills, a weakened domestic energy system, not to mention extreme and lasting harms to our communities and our health."
In response, she called on "unlikely partners and coalitions to push for a modern, democratically grounded energy policy that benefits the public."
'It's essential that we continue to hold regulators accountable: Many of FERC's decisions have disregarded states' and communities' objections. Advocates must keep challenging approvals through litigation and public pressure—making the case that the project can and should be denied if there is no genuine need or if adverse impacts are overwhelming," she said.
"We truly urge policymakers, stakeholders, and the public to see these executive orders for what they truly are: an unnecessary and counterproductive retreat to outdated energy strategies," Gibson said. "The real emergency here isn't a lack of fossil fuel extraction, transmission, or export. It's lack of vision and courage, and competent governance to embrace the modern clean energy economy we know we need and deserve."
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DeepSeek Gives the Lie to the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Latest Stalling Tactic
The industry holds that we will need so much electricity for the data centers to keep this technology running that we’ll have to give up on dealing with climate change for now. A new, more efficient AI challenges that.
Jan 31, 2025
Cince we’ve all been weathering the head-spinning assault on the Constitution by the new administration (and, at Third Act and elsewhere, trying to do something about it), I thought it might make sense to provide you with one interesting piece of good news.
It concerns this DeepSeek Chinese AI program that you’ve doubtless been reading about in recent days. I’m the last person to turn to for an analysis of its virtues (I remain fully dependent on my highly-developed Natural Cluelessness), but I am very clear that it complicates the main current task of the fossil fuel industry: glomming onto AI as the latest excuse for building out a bunch of gas-fired power plants.
That narrative—which has been building for a year or so—holds that we will need so much electricity for the data centers to keep this technology running that we’ll have to give up on dealing with climate change for now. It reached its zenith last week when the new administration announced something called Stargate, a $500 billion plan that, as U.S. President Donald Trump put it, would be “the largest AI infrastructure project in history.” This was the moment when he declared an “energy emergency” so that we could build more power plants (but not, of course, the solar or battery parks that Silicon Valley experts have testified would be the most efficient way to power these megacenters).
The increasingly gloomy idea that there was no possible way we could every deal with climate because AI would soak up every new electron that sun and wind could ever provide, may not be quite as true as it seemed to some a week ago.
I would venture to say, given Trump’s predilections, that he neither understands nor cares much about the AI part of all of this, but he completely groks it as a way to pay back Big Oil for the $445 million they invested in the last election. (Political donations come in millions with an M, and the paybacks come in billions with a B—of our money). As Bloombergreported, the whole DeepSeek incident shows how dependent on this AI story the fossil fuel industry is as an excuse for expansion (just as a couple of years ago it was dependent on the Ukraine war story):
In one brutal blow, DeepSeek has revealed just how many energy-related businesses in the U.S. have been banking on an artificial intelligence boom—and the surge in power demand it was supposed to bring.
For the past year, their growth expectations and share prices were boosted by the belief that AI would require an unprecedented wave of data center construction, with some centers needing as much electricity as entire cities. Utilities and power plant operators benefited, too, but the effect went far wider than such obvious industries, touching an astonishing array of companies.
That became clear the moment China’s DeepSeek unveiled a chatbot that could rival the best American AI programs while using just a fraction of the electricity, perhaps as little as 10%. DeepSeek’s announcement hammered the shares of uranium producers and natural gas pipeline operators alike. Companies that supply power plant equipment and data center cooling systems suffered as well in Monday’s big selloff.
I don’t think we know enough yet to know if that claim—”rival the best American AI programs while using just a fraction of the electricity, perhaps as little as 10%”—is actually true. There are voices in the U.S. today beginning to claim that DeepSeek plundered American code to make its breakthroughs (which is truly funny, since American AI merrily plundered everything everyone has ever written, to make its breakthroughs). And there are others saying that DeepSeek, by making AI more affordable, will actually increase the amount that it is used.
But it does seem as if something new is afoot—the search for efficiency, instead of just massive brute force—in constructing artificial intelligence. As the investment gurus Dylan Lewis and Tim Beyers at The Motley Foolput it:
One of the main things that has popped up a lot in the reporting on this is that the compute necessary for what is running on DeepSeek is a fraction of the compute for some of the other systems. Watching the way that the market is processing this, we are seeing Big Tech companies take a hit. We are seeing some of the chip companies take a hit. We're also seeing energy companies take a hit because there is this feeling that maybe as we get a little bit more technologically advanced as other players start coming into the space, some of the energy demands for this technology won't be as big as people have maybe originally thought.
and
There is no way we are going to be building out the amount of energy infrastructure required to service all this at the level we are talking about in the timeframe we were talking about. Then what happens? You have a constraint. Do you keep doing what you're doing and overwhelm the energy infrastructure, knowing full well you can't build it out at the level that you want to, in the timeframe you want to, or do you do what the industry always does, which is find areas of efficiency to scale in a better, more economical way? That's what always happens.
I’m not beginning to tell you how all this comes out. All I’m saying is, the increasingly gloomy idea that there was no possible way we could every deal with climate because AI would soak up every new electron that sun and wind could ever provide, may not be quite as true as it seemed to some a week ago. (It would be awfully nice if this kind of move toward computing efficiency catches on—here’s another story from this week, about new software fixes that seem capable of reducing power demand at these data centers by 30%.)
You could, I think, even draw a crude analogy between DeepSeek and solar power, in that it seems to be producing the same thing that OpenAI and Meta are producing for a fraction of the cost, the same way that photovoltaics produce power more cheaply than Exxon. And since it’s open source, it undercuts them in another way too: Anyone can get their hands on this and work with it. (“Anyone” meaning anyone who knows what they’re doing—not me, obviously). The advantage of hoarding chips, which has been Big Tech’s strategy, may turn out to be kind of like the advantage of hoarding “reserves” of hydrocarbons—less solid than might have been expected. To complete this imperfect analogy, AI, like the solar cell, may have been invented in the U.S., but it’s China who may figure out how to make the most of it.
It was only two (very long) weeks ago that former President Joe Biden, in his farewell address, warned us against the “tech-industrial complex.” Some youngsters, working around the constraints imposed by the U.S., seem to have struck a blow in that direction. It’s obviously far too much to hope that the U.S. and China might cooperate to develop this new technology in some rational way—the best we can hope for, I think, is that they won’t actually destroy the planet en route to whatever nirvana these new intelligences have in mind for us.
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'A Disastrous Mistake': Trump Taps Fracking CEO Chris Wright for Energy Secretary
"This is going to be the oiliest administration since George W. Bush," lamented one environmental campaigner.
Nov 16, 2024
In a move that alarmed green groups, Republican President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday tapped Chris Wright—the CEO of a fracking company who denies the climate emergency—as his energy secretary.
Wright, who leads the Denver-based oil services company Liberty Energy, is a Republican donor whose nomination to head the Department of Energy is backed by powerful fossil fuel boosters including oil and gas tycoon and Trump adviser Harold Hamm.
"Chris has been a leading technologist and entrepreneur in Energy. He has worked in Nuclear, Solar, Geothermal, and Oil and Gas," Trump said in a statement announcing his choice. "Most significantly, Chris was one of the pioneers who helped launch the American Shale Revolution that fueled American Energy Independence, and transformed the Global Energy Markets and Geopolitics."
"Not surprising but still appalling that Trump's pick for Energy Secretary is a Big Oil CEO."
Trump—who has promised to increase fossil fuel production beyond the record-setting levels of the Biden administration—also said Wright would serve on a new Council of National Energy led by Doug Burgum, his pick to run the Interior Department.
In a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, Wright said that he is "honored and grateful for the opportunity" to be nominated by Trump.
"My dedication to bettering human lives remains steadfast, with a focus on making American energy more affordable, reliable, and secure," he added. "Energy is the lifeblood that makes everything in life possible. Energy matters. I am looking forward to getting to work."
Wright calls himself "a lifelong environmentalist" and said last year that "climate change is a real problem." However, he also said in 2023 that "there is no such thing as clean energy or dirty energy" and that "there is no climate crisis and we're not in the midst of an energy transition either."
While fossil fuel proponents cheered Wright's nomination, climate and environmental defenders voiced alarm over the pick.
"Not surprising but still appalling that Trump's pick for Energy Secretary is a Big Oil CEO," League of Conservation Voters senior vice president for government affairs Tiernan Sittenfeld wrote on X.
Natural Resources Defense Council senior vice president for climate and energy Jackie Wong blasted Wright as "a champion of fossil fuels" whose nomination was "a disastrous mistake."
"The Energy Department should be doing all it can to develop and expand the energy sources of the 21st century, not trying to promote the dirty fuels of the last century," Wong said in a statement reported by The Associated Press. "Given the devastating impacts of climate-fueled disasters, DOE's core mission of researching and promoting cleaner energy solutions is more important now than ever."
Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, lamented that "this is going to be the oiliest administration since George W. Bush."
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