Trump’s National Energy Emergency Is Here

Donald Trump looked to further unleash American energy production as one of the first actions of his new term, signing an executive order declaring a “national energy emergency” among the litany of other actions and declarations he made on Monday.

Earlier, in his inaugural address, he boasted that the United States has “the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it.”

“We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again, right to the top, and export American energy all over the world,” Trump said.

The order describes an “active threat to the American people from high energy prices,” as “hostile state and non-state foreign actors have targeted our domestic energy infrastructure, weaponized our reliance on foreign energy, and abused their ability to cause dramatic swings within international commodity markets.” The order directs agency leaders to “exercise any lawful emergency authorities available to them, as well as all other lawful authorities they may possess” to facilitate U.S. energy production, including — but not limited to — activities on federal lands.

The Trump administration had earlier outlined its plans in a document posted to the White House website Monday morning, which promised regulatory reform not only for “energy production and use,” but also for “mining and processing of non-fuel minerals.”

The document said the purpose of the national energy emergency would be to “use all necessary resources to build critical infrastructure.” In remarks in the days before the inauguration, Trump described the goal of declaring an energy emergency as enabling investors to more easily “build big plants, AI plants,” and that the U.S. needs to “double the energy that we already have — and it’s going to end up being more than that.”

That could mean waiving environmental rules — including undoing the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant emissions rules — in order to speed the building of power plants in order to power new data centers.

While the exact parameters of these plans are still being drawn and will probably require either months-long rulemaking processes or legislation or both, by Monday morning, clean energy and environmental groups have already started to weigh in.

“On his first day back in the White House, President Trump is trying to turn back the clock on America’s clean energy leadership at the expense of American people and their health,” Debbie Weyl, the acting United States director of the World Resources Institute, said in a statement following the president's address to the nation. “If realized, President Trump’s actions would sacrifice the United States’ competitiveness globally, raise energy prices for American families, and pollute our air. Pledging to roll back climate policies that have created more than 400,000 good-paying American jobs will only hurt workers and our economy.”

On the other hand, at least portions of the clean energy industry are seeing the bright side of Trump’s emphasis on energy maximalism.

“A promise to achieve greater energy abundance in America must include leveraging the incredible, proven power of advanced energy technologies. 96% of all the new electricity added to America’s power grid in 2024 was provided by advanced energy, the lowest-cost way to reliability meet growing electricity demand,” Heather O’Neill, the president and chief executive of the trade group Advanced Energy United, said in a similarly timed statement.

“Our power grid faces real challenges, and at a moment when wildfires and extreme temperatures threaten lives across the country, it’s clearer than ever that we need to deepen our investments in advanced energy solutions that increase resilience and lower costs. We urge the Administration to embrace the market forces and tax cuts that are empowering states to meet their energy needs and goals.”

When the White House published the text of the emergency declaration, however, it became clear that Trump took a narrow view of what kinds of energy might serve to mitigate the situation: “crude oil, natural gas, lease condensates, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal heat, the kinetic movement of flowing water, and critical minerals.” No hydrogen, no solar, and no wind.

While the newly inaugurated Trump administration has already taken a dramatic rhetorical turn in how it treats the oil and gas industry compared to Biden’s, it’s less clear that production can actually be meaningfully increased. While the Biden administration was stingy in opening up public lands for fossil fuel exploration — often doing so only under political or legal pressure — oil and gas production hit record levels while Biden was in office.

Any Biden administration efforts to curtail fossil fuel production faced legal and political pushback. In the first week of his presidency, Biden issued a moratorium on new oil and gas leasing on public lands, which was quickly halted by a federal judge. During the drafting of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate law, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin insisted on oil and gas lease sales as a condition of his support, and then on opening up Willow, the oil project on Alaska’s North Slope, for drilling by ConocoPhillips. At the same time, gas prices soared to over $5 a gallon following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, leading the Biden administration to use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a tool to bring down oil prices, selling almost 200 million barrels.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve now has just under 400 million barrels, well short of its legal limit of 714 million. Trump has promised to refill it, which would be a boon to American domestic oil producers, although this would likely require a Congressional appropriation.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the signing of the executive order declaring a national energy emergency.