By Paul H. Tice
Excerpt:
President-elect Trump has an opportunity to put the nation’s energy policy on a sound and rational footing. That will be possible only if the new administration learns from its past mistakes.
During his first term, Mr. Trump halted the regulatory attack against the energy sector that began under President Obama by using a combination of executive orders and agency rulings. Many of these were challenged and overruled by liberal judges. The effect was only to stall the regulatory momentum, not reverse it. The domestic coal industry went further into runoff mode on Mr. Trump’s watch, and the regulatory onslaught picked up in 2021 where it left off four years earlier.
Mr. Trump’s initial efforts were ineffective because they were built on transitory executive actions. His strategy failed to root out the climate bureaucracy, which has hijacked energy policy. Most U.S. climate rules and regulations have been implemented via executive agencies and the courts, rather than through legislation.
With this in mind, among Mr. Trump’s top priorities should be to free U.S. energy policy from the artificial constraint of greenhouse-gas emissions caps and re-establish the objectives of reliability, abundance and low cost. To achieve lasting results, he will need to restore the rule of law and take advantage of the Republican majorities in Congress. Here are two actions to get the ball rolling:
First, rather than simply exit the Paris Agreement again via executive order, Mr. Trump needs to end the unconstitutional back and forth by submitting the climate treaty to the Senate. That chamber’s consent is required of all binding international treaties, including to the Paris Agreement and the United Nations’ companion Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.
A treaty requires two-thirds approval to pass the upper chamber. With a 53-seat GOP majority, the Senate’s vote would effectively kill the Paris Agreement, restoring American control over national energy policy and removing much of the justification for aggressive U.S. emissions reductions. There should be no waiting period to exit from the treaty, considering it was passed through extralegal means.
Second, the Trump administration ought to strike the 2009 Endangerment Finding from the books. The ruling, devised by the Environmental Protection Agency, compels the EPA to regulate carbon pollution from greenhouse gases because such emissions “endanger both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations.” The provision has justified anti-fossil-fuel bias across government agencies, particularly during the Biden years.
Rather than issuing a new counterfinding and duking it out in the courts, the Trump White House should urge Congress to pass legislation that reins in the EPA by reasserting congressional authority over the Clean Air Act. Such a move would be consistent with recent Supreme Court decisions in West Virginia v. EPA (2022) and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), both of which found that executive agencies can’t implement major policy changes without explicit authorization from Congress. Regulating carbon emissions to set national energy policy is doubtless a question of “vast economic and political significance” for lawmakers, not unelected regulators.
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Exiting the Paris Agreement and nixing the 2009 Endangerment Finding would empower Mr. Trump’s administration to shut down the bevy of U.N.-aligned decarbonization efforts by state and local governments and net-zero alliances among banks and financial investors. Each of these contravenes federal law by constraining international trade and interstate commerce, violating antitrust law and discriminating against hydrocarbon producers.
Toppling the climate-change bureaucracy would also collapse the “sustainable finance” movement, aka “environmental, social and governance” investing, on Wall Street. Without climate change as its lodestar and moral suit of armor, ESG is a ragtag collection of liberal policy desires that will quickly blow away.
Mr. Trump has been given a second chance to right U.S. energy policy. To be successful, he’ll have to move past campaign slogans and superficial fixes. With unified Republican control of Washington, there’s no excuse for failing to recognize the climate elephant in the room.
Mr. Tice is a senior fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics and author of “The Race to Zero: How ESG Investing Will Crater the Global Financial System.”
