Trump can’t wait to host a Bunga Bunga party of fossil fuel abandonment
According to The New York Times, hordes of oil lobbyists, like demolition workers, are lining up outside the energy and environmental agencies, ready to relaunch the “Drill, Baby Drill” era of American energy policy. But the Times also reports that President-elect Donald Trump has a new soft spot for electric vehicles, courtesy of his new bestie, Elon Musk. We better hope so.
These conflicting signals reflect a very different world than when Trump was the last president. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint may call for unwinding “Biden’s climate fanaticism,” but reality has a different script.
The incoming President will quickly realize that addressing climate change isn’t just another divisive political wedge issue–it’s a strategic imperative that will reshape global power dynamics faster than Musk can blast a rocket into space.
The obsolete fossil fuel playbook
Trump re-enters a vastly more complex energy world dominated by a rapidly escalating climate crisis and a dramatically different energy market. Most critical, America’s old oil and gas way is no longer the only game in town. Renewable energy is now competing head-to-head with fossil fuels in markets across the world. Trump’s new enemy are the forces fighting to free themselves from fossil fuels. China alone plans to displace six million barrels of oil demand by 2030.
New climate allies
Trump and his noxious fossil fuel allies are determined to stop this egregious break from fossil fuel heterodoxy. They will do anything to preserve their iron grip on the world’s energy use.
But the global climate conversation is shifting. The United States is no longer the only menacing dog on the block. Trump’s climate denial is nothing but an opportunity for Chinese strongman Xi Jinping. He is salivating at the chance to drive America into the dustbin of history. As determined as Trump is to preserve America’s fossil fuel hegemony, China is equally focused on ending its dependence on importing fossil fuels. And China now has the economic muscle to do it. Its command economy has gone into hyper-drive, not merely to build cheap solar panels for export but to gain global political and economic dominance abroad.
As determined as Trump is to preserve America’s fossil fuel hegemony, China is equally focused on ending its dependence on importing fossil fuels.
Europe is also in no mood to join Trump’s Bunga Bunga petrol party and re-embrace fossil fuels. It isn’t just transitioning away from Russian gas; it’s re-engineering a new rules-based energy transition more aligned with China than the United States. For example, both are accelerating green energy rule-making with the Common Ground Taxonomy (CGT). This collaborative effort recognizes 72 overlapping climate mitigation activities. No Trump executive order will stop that.
The global climate conversation has also become far more nuanced. Climate denial and stunts like abandoning the Paris climate agreement, we are seen even by the petrostates as embarrassingly naive and, well, so American.
As the latest petro-funded UN climate conference (COP 29) gets underway this week in the minor petroleum potentate of Baku, Azerbaijan, even the world’s largest private and state-owned fossil fuel companies are in no mood to abandon the useless but useful Paris Agreement. Why piss off large portions of the world–particularly China–when you can have your cake and eat it too?
Trump’s inconvenient awakening
We hope Musk is telling Trump these brutal truths. Or telling him the National Intelligence Council isn’t whipping up a “divisive political and cultural agenda” when it warns that climate change will exacerbate global flashpoints. Nor is the Council being “woke” — when it warns about the threat-multiplying impact of the rapidly escalating climate crisis on national security, economic stability, and global influence.
We hope Musk warns Trump that a new clean energy world is emerging. However, if the early reports from Washington were accurate, Trump will ignore Musk. Instead, Trump is building the energy equivalent of France’s infamous Maginot Line. Trump’s version is a fatally flawed fossil fuel line of defense that the Chinese, like the Germans in 1940, will simply bypass as they storm forward to the greenfields of renewable energy.
Barbarians at the gate
So to use language Trump prefers, will Trump decide to be Elon’s bitch or the mistress of the oil industry? Will he protect America’s new green industrial base–mostly in very red states–or transform federal land into hydrocarbon havens while gutting any environmental oversight? The answer is probably all because, after all, Trump can’t wait to host his Bunga Bunga party of fossil fuel abandonment with the growing hordes of opportunists gathering at the black gates of the White House.
Party on! Andrew Jackson’s rowdy inauguration party. Source: the White House
But a word of warning. Choose wisely. By clinging to our toxic energy past, Trump is not only hastening our decline as a global power but embracing the destructive powers of fossil fuels. By doing so, Trump will soon make America the enemy of much of the rest of the world, already suffering from the consequences of climate violence.
Rapturous denial
Dead Kool-Aid sipping cultists. Source: Time
But we can’t blame it all on Trump. The American people seem to be in rapturous denial and have heartily endorsed his climate-denying mandate. For America, the decision to elect a president determined to put the climate crisis into hyperdrive is, well, the greatest act of collective suicide since crazy cultists sipped Kool-Aid with Jim Jones in the jungles of Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978.
Unfortunately, this time, like it or not, all of us will be forced to drink the Kool-Aid as Trump sells out America and the world to the highest bidder.
