Trump vowed in a second term to issue a “national emergency declaration to achieve a massive increase in domestic energy supply.”
Citing the need for more electricity to continue growing the artificial intelligence (AI) sector and keep the U.S. tech industry ahead of China, former President Donald Trump on Sept. 5 vowed in a second term to issue a “national emergency declaration to achieve a massive increase in domestic energy supply.”
But standing in the way of ramped up domestic energy production is a federal permitting process notorious for its foot-dragging. Some in Congress acknowledge the problem, but their latest effort to rectify the situation risks being overtaken by surging energy demand and troubling geopolitical realities.
Hoping to unravel the reams of red tape that have tied up transportation, energy, and mining projects for years, and in some cases killed them altogether, Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Sen. John Barasso (R-Wyo.) want their colleagues to approve their “Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024.” Centralizing decision-making on power transmission nationwide is the centerpiece of their legislation. Accordingly, it would bolster the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) authority to approve interstate transmission lines and require interregional transmission planning.
In a bid to satisfy as many conflicting interests as possible, the bill establishes deadlines for filing lawsuits over energy and mining projects, and sets requirements for onshore and offshore oil, gas, coal and renewable energy leasing and permitting. It also includes provisions on hard-rock mining and sets a 90-day deadline for the secretary of Energy to grant or deny liquified natural gas (LNG) export applications, according to a summary of the legislation.
Many of the wind, solar and transmission-line projects favored by these groups have encountered the same permitting and litigation delays that have bedeviled fossil-fuel producers. On the other hand, the Sierra Club opposes the measure, finding it insufficiently hostile to fossil fuels and saying it “would open up federal lands and waters to more leasing and drilling and unnecessarily rush reviews of natural gas export projects…”
Aside from all the problems inherent in vesting so much authority in one federal bureaucracy, FERC, to handle the nation’s power transmission challenges, such conventional approaches are no match for the transformative developments already roiling America’s electricity supply. While politicians, along with some less-than-savvy investors, have been content to pour wads of public and private cash into the green energy transition, artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly upending the world elites thought they knew.
Energy-hungry data centers — there are currently over 2,700 in the United States with hundreds more planned — need electricity 24/7/365 if they are to meet the extraordinary demands of AI. The amount of electricity AI-driven data centers require cannot be produced by intermittent solar and wind power transmitted hundreds if not thousands of miles from the sunny Southwest or the gusty plains of the Upper Midwest. Big Tech’s demands on an already shaky grid far outstrip anything politically fashionable solar panels and wind turbines can ever deliver. To their chagrin, the Big Four data center developers — Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Beta — now find themselves increasingly dependent on the very fossil fuels and — where available — nuclear power they have been so quick to dismiss over the years.
But given the choice of meeting their lofty Net-Zero carbon emissions goals or cashing in on AI’s financial promise, Big Tech will choose the second option. And the stakes go well beyond the companies’ respective bottom lines. Data centers are essential to AI, and AI is essential to national security. If the U.S. is not the global leader in AI, China (along with its junior partner, Russia) will be.
“AI can be the foundation of a new industrial base it would be wise for our country to embrace,” Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, recently wrote in the Washington Post.
Ceding the United States’ current lead in AI to China would be a blow from which America’s industrial base, and thus its military preparedness, would be hard pressed to recover. Data centers, powered by a steady flow of reliable energy, are now key assets in the perilous world of 21st century geopolitics.
As neighbors in the communities in which they are located, data centers are a mixed blessing. They generate enormous revenues to local governments but can be seen by nearby residents as disruptive to their community. The non-descript but noisy buildings comprising data centers house thousands of computer servers processing the data that make the internet, cloud computing and AI possible. They not only require gobs of power but also plenty of water used to lower temperatures.
Together with government-driven efforts to put more EVs on the road, data centers further complicate the challenges facing the already stressed electric grid. These developments are beyond the reach of the horse-trading that goes into Capitol Hill legislation. What is clear, however, is that the vaunted green-energy transformation will never be equal to the task before us.
Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).
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President Donald Trump signed four executive orders Tuesday promoting the deregulation and expansion of the “beautiful, clean coal” industry in the U.S.
The first order White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf said might be “one of the most significant executive orders” the president has issued so far.
“This directs all departments and agencies of the federal government to end all discriminatory policies against the coal industry. This ends the leasing moratorium that prevents new coal projects on federal land, and it’s going to accelerate all permitting and funding for new coal projects,” Scharf said.
The other executive orders attempt to prevent some Biden-era policies from going into effect that would have caused the shuttering of dozens of American coal plants; support policies promoting the continued incorporation of coal and fossil-fuel forms of energy into the grid; and direct the Department of Justice to investigate state policies that may illegally or unconstitutionally “[discriminate] against coal” and “secure sources of energy.”
The White House hosted a large group of coal miners, members of Congress, administration officials and others Tuesday afternoon to commemorate the “Unleashing American Energy” signing event.
“This is a very important day to me because we’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned despite the fact that it was just about the best – certainly the best in terms of power, real power,” Trump said.
Trump said he was “honored” to be signing the orders in defense of the coal industry and that the administration was “ending Joe Biden’s war on beautiful, clean coal once and for all.”
Trump also said his administration was working on something unique that would guarantee the coal industry would not be upended by changes in administrations, based on an idea he had “about 15 minutes” before the event.
“We’re going to give a guarantee that… if somebody comes in, they can’t change it at a whim. They’re gonna have to go through hell to close you up,” he said to the coal miners.
Under the new administration, the department of the interior has approved the expansion of the Spring Creek Mine in Montana, and Trump promised there would be more coal ventures in Alabama, North Dakota, Utah, Wyoming and other states.
“I think we’re gonna look back with great pride at what we’ve done today – not just in putting people to work but at really reawakening our country,” Trump said.
In the preamble to the Paris Agreement, world leaders loftily declared they would keep temperature rises “well below 2°C” and perhaps even under 1.5°C. That was never on the cards—it would have required the world’s economies to effectively come to a grinding halt.
The truth is that the “net zero” green agenda, based on massive subsidies and expensive legislation, will likely cost more than CAD$38 trillion per year across the century, making it utterly unattractive to voters in almost every nation on Earth.
When President Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement for the first time in 2017, then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was quick to claim the moral high ground, declaring that “we will continue to work with our domestic and international partners to drive progress on one of the greatest challenges we face as a world.”
Trudeau has now been swept from the stage. On his first day back in office, President Trump signed an executive order that again begins the formal, twelve-month-long process of withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement.
It will be tempting for Canada to step anew into the void left by the United States. But if the goal is to make effective climate policy, whoever is Canada’s prime minister needs to avoid empty virtue signaling. It would be easy for Canada to declare again that it’ll form a “coalition of the willing” with Europe. The truth is that, just like last time, that approach would do next to nothing for the planet.
Climate summits have generated vast amounts of attention and breathless reporting giving the impression that they are crucial to the planet’s survival. Scratch the surface, and the results are far less impressive. In 2021, the world promised to phase-down coal. Since then, global coal consumption has only gone up. Virtually every summit has promised to cut emissions but they’ve increased almost every single year, and 2024 reached a new high.
Way before the Paris Agreement was inked, the Kyoto Protocol was once sold as a key part of the solution to global warming. Yet studies show it achieved virtually nothing for climate change.
In the preamble to the Paris Agreement, world leaders loftily declared they would keep temperature rises “well below 2°C” and perhaps even under 1.5°C. That was never on the cards—it would have required the world’s economies to effectively come to a grinding halt.
The truth is that the “net zero” green agenda, based on massive subsidies and expensive legislation, will likely cost more than CAD$38 trillion per year across the century, making it utterly unattractive to voters in almost every nation on Earth.
The awkward reality is that emissions from Canada, the EU, and other countries pursuing climate policies matter little in the 21st century. Canada likely only makes up about 1.5 per cent of the world’s emissions. Add together Canada’s output with that of every single country of the rich-world OECD, and this only makes up about one-fifth of global emissions this century, using the United Nations’ ‘middle of the road’ forecast. The other four-fifths of emissions come mostly from China, India and Africa.
Even if wealthy countries like Canada impoverish themselves, the result is tiny — run the UN’s standard climate model with and without Canada going net-zero in 2050, and the difference is immeasurable even in 2100. Moreover, much of the production and emissions just move to the Global South—and even less is achieved.
One good example of this is the United Kingdom, which—like Prime Minister Trudeau once did—has leaned into climate policies, suggesting it would lead the efforts for strong climate agreements. British families are paying a heavy price for their government going farther than almost any other in pursuing the climate agenda: just the inflation-adjusted electricity price, weighted across households and industry, has tripled from 2003 to 2023, mostly because of climate policies. This need not have been so: the US electricity price has remained almost unchanged over the same period.
The effect on families is devastating. Had prices stayed at 2003 levels, an average family-of-four would now be spending CAD$3,380 on electricity—which includes indirect industry costs. Instead, it now pays $9,740 per year.
Rising electricity costs make investment less attractive: European businesses pay triple US electricity costs, and nearly two-thirds of European companies say energy prices are now a major impediment to investment.
The Paris Treaty approach is fundamentally flawed. Carbon emissions continue to grow because cheap, reliable power, mostly from fossil fuels, drives economic growth. Wealthy countries like Canada, the US, and European Union members have started to cut emissions—often by shifting production elsewhere—but the rest of the world remains focused on eradicating poverty.
Poor countries will rightly reject making carbon cuts unless there is a huge flow of “climate aid” from rich nations, and want trillions of US dollars per year. That won’t happen. The new US government will not pay, and the other rich countries cannot foot the bill alone.
Without these huge transfers of wealth, China, India and many other developing countries will disavow expensive climate policies, too. This potentially leaves a rag-tag group led by a few Western European progressive nations, which can scarcely afford their own policies and have no ability to pay off everyone else.
When the United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement in 2017, Canada’s doubling down on the Paris Treaty sent the signal that it would be worthwhile spending hundreds of trillions of dollars to make no real difference to temperatures. We fool ourselves if we pretend that doing so for a second time will help the planet.
We need to realize that fixing climate change isn’t about sanctimonious summits, lofty speeches, and bluster. In coming weeks I’ll outline the case for efficient policies like innovation, adaptation and prosperity.
