The Oil Administration Has Arrived

It is important, off the top, to refute the basic idea: There is no “energy emergency.” In any meaningful sense, the United States is awash in energy, be it to travel from one place to another or to keep the lights on or power massive data centers or keep thousands of planes aloft. It is, before we even get to the details, an absurdity.

And yet there it is, one of the avalanche of alternatingly preposterous and evil executive orders that spewed forth from the White House on Trump’s first day back: “Declaring a National Energy Emergency,” issued under the authority of the National Emergencies Act. It’s justification is, put simply, a lie: “The energy and critical minerals (‘energy’) identification, leasing, development, production, transportation, refining, and generation capacity of the United States are all far too inadequate to meet our Nation’s needs.” It blames the previous administration’s policies for raising energy prices in “devastating” fashion, which, again, is simply not the case.

Just to take one metric, the one that at least in normal times tended to have outsized predictive or even causal effect on elections: gas prices were as low in December as they were through most of Biden’s term in office, down substantially from the spikes seen in 2022. The executive order warns of “a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid” — while surely much of the U.S. power grid could use substantial upgrades, it is not actually unreliable. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that the grid has an average reliability of 99.95 percent, meaning the average customer loses power less than twice per year; most of those losses don’t have much to do with energy supply, rather are usually just due to a falling tree branch.

None of that matters, of course. The “emergency” here is that there is more money to be made by one very particular industry and all of its friends, and an oil-soaked Cerberus now running all three branches of government means there is little to stop them from doing so. The oil industry was absolutely frothing over the potential of a second Trump term, and now that it has arrived they will take advantage.

The executive order instructs agency heads to “identify and exercise any lawful emergency authorities available to them, as well as all other lawful authorities they may possess, to facilitate the identification, leasing, siting, production, transportation, refining, and generation of domestic energy resources.” Never mind that the United States produced more oil and gas in 2024 than any nation has ever produced in the history of the planet, nor that even before Trump took office it was projected that 2025 would see those records fall again; it is not enough. It is never enough.

And in case the general language of emergency order was in danger of being misunderstood, several other moves make the purpose here clear. First there’s an executive order “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential,” an obvious attempt to remove some of the shackles that have been imposed over the years on oil extraction in the far north. Then there’s the one on “Unleashing American Energy,” in which agencies are instructed to, more or less, short-circuit the regulatory and permitting processes in order to remove “undue burden” on energy development — “with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources” — while also removing electric vehicle incentives to, don’t laugh, “promote true consumer choice.” And finally the full mask-off version, the executive order that halts all offshore wind power permitting and slows or even stops all onshore wind power development on public lands.

This is an oil rush, plain and simple. The oil industry, for all intents and purposes, is now more or less synonymous with the Oval Office; an oil executive is nominated to run the Energy Department, the industry gladly accepted last year’s quid-pro-quo demand, and major oil companies have spent the last few months loudly walking back any wink-wink bullshit about reducing emissions and contributing to any climate change efforts. This is the end result of not just letting Trump back into power, but the mostly global insistence on treating the most damaging industry in human history like any other and not the pariah it should be. Big Oil won’t stop until it is made to; whatever that would look like, this is the opposite.