Why the Trump administration is wrong about an energy crisis in the US, according to experts
The Trump administration has been attempting to spark the idea of a looming energy crisis in the U.S., but those claims couldn't be further from reality, according to several experts who spoke to ABC News.
Immediately upon taking office for his second term, President Donald Trump declared a "national energy emergency," claiming that leasing, development, production, transportation, refining and generation capacity of energy in the U.S. is "far too inadequate" to meet the nation's needs.
Trump's appointees have followed suit on the political messaging.
Last month, Lee Zeldin, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, announced the agency's spearheading of "Powering the Great American Comeback. The initiative that includes a pillar to "restore American energy dominance," which claims will lower energy bills for Americans as well as allow the country to "stop relying on energy sources from adversaries."
U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright released a memo last month directing the agency to take immediate action to unleash "the golden era of energy dominance." U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum began his tenure by vowing to advance "American energy independence".
But there isn't even the slightest hint of a domestic energy crisis, especially when compared to actual crises that occurred in 1973, 1979 and 2022, Gregory Nemet, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin's Energy Institute, told ABC News.
"Prices for gasoline are mid-range over the last, say, 20 years," Nemet said. "There's plenty of supply. We're not having electricity outages. We're not having lines of gas stations."
The U.S. was breaking records for the most fossil fuels ever drilled under Trump's predecessor. In 2023, the Biden administration produced 12.9 million barrels per day, breaking the record set in 2019 at 12.3 million barrels, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. For the last several years, the U.S. has been the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world.
"There's no crisis or emergency by any conventional standard or use of the word," Noah Kaufman, a senior researcher at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, told ABC News.
Trump campaigned heavily on the promise of increasing fossil fuel production but there has not been any significant increase in drilling over the last several months, Bob Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology and a faculty fellow at Cornell University's Atkinson Center for Sustainability, told ABC News
"And I don't think there's likely to be," he added.
With oil prices remaining steady, the oil and gas industry may not even be incentivized to drill more, the experts said.
As of Tuesday, the price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil, the key benchmark for oil prices in the U.S., was about $66 per barrel -- "not crazy-high," Kaufman said.
"They're not going to increase drilling if they lose money by doing so," Howarth said.
The world doesn't need more oil, despite Trump's suggestions that the U.S. is not producing nearly enough, the experts said. The U.S. may be the largest exporter of natural gas in the world, but global demand is falling -- with countries in Europe and Asia decreasing their use of fossil fuels as renewables such as wind, solar, batteries and electric vehicles, eat away at the demand for fossil fuels, Nemet said.
"It's cheaper and more energy secure for them to use renewable power," Howarth said.
Trump's attempts to bring oil and gas back to the forefront will set the U.S. behind compared to other G2 countries and their climate goals. the experts said. China and Europe are rapidly developing renewables energy.
"We're doing nothing like that here," Howarth said.
The Trump administration is "disingenuously" using the rhetoric of an energy crisis to promote fossil fuels, speed the permitting of extraction projects and justify the bypassing of environmental reviews, David Konisky, a professor of environmental politics at Indiana University's O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, told ABC News.
The messaging of an energy emergency is also the administration's attempt to defend its ideological goals of deregulation and reversal of Biden-era efforts to address climate change, Konisky said.
A lot of of the momentum for solar, wind and other clean energy sources in recent years came from tax credits and other policies in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law other legislation passed during the Biden administration, Kaufman said. Trump promised during the campaign to rescind all unspent funds from the IRA.
While there may no shortage of fossil fuels in sight, climate scientists and international communities continue to warn of the climate consequences the planet is facing if worldwide production of fossil fuels -- the main culprit for global warming -- are not drastically reduced in the near future.
The development of the U.S. as a fossil fuel superpower is a "brazen disregard" for climate action, Matt Huber, a professor in Syracuse University's geography and environment department, told ABC News
"We don't have an energy crisis," Howarth said. "What we have is a climate crisis."
ABC News' Climate Unit contributed to this report.
