Donald Trump Invents an Energy Emergency

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.

Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.

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. The Post again: “Hamm is working ‘incredibly hard to raise as much money as he can from the energy sector,’ said a Trump campaign aide. ‘We’ve gotten max-out checks from people we’ve never gotten a dollar from before.’ ”

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.

The corruption of language, however, is slightly different. 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. (Trump’s executive orders, by halting the leasing of federal waters for offshore wind farms, would effectively limit the amount of energy the country could potentially generate.)

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. “The national-energy emergency is crucial because we are in an A.I. race with China, and our ability to produce domestic American energy is so crucial such that we can generate the electricity and power that’s needed to stay at the global forefront of technology,” a Trump official, speaking not for attribution to reporters, said, on the morning of the Inauguration.

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. “Estimated time to operation for a large off-grid solar microgrid could be around 2 years (1-2 years for site acquisition and permitting plus 1-2 years for site buildout), though there’s no obvious reason why this couldn’t be done faster by very motivated and competent builders,” the report states. That’s because essentially all you have to do is put up a bunch of solar panels and some batteries and run a wire to your data center—not build a huge centralized power plant and connect it to the grid. The report continues, “Off-grid solar microgrids offer a fast path to power AI datacenters at enormous scale. 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. For years, activists tried to persuade Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency, mostly in an effort to focus attention and action on the crisis. Biden instead worked hard to build out clean energy through the Inflation Reduction Act, virtuous work that got him, and the climate crisis, almost no attention at all.

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. Canute, however, was wilier than our usual version of the legend—he was actually trying to show his flattering courtiers that there were limits to his power. The twelfth-century English historian Henry of Huntingdon says that, as the water swept past, Canute declared, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.” He then hung his gold crown on a crucifix and never wore it again, “to the honor of God the almighty King.”

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. ♦