It is insane to think there can be another new “golden age” of oil and gas expansion in America. No matter what President Donald Trump may say, we cannot afford to let it happen because it would see us crossing certain tipping points that would bring runaway and calamitous climate change.
In the last 20 years, the US almost tripled oil production and doubled natural gas extraction to once again become the world’s biggest fossil fuel supplier. The revival came from new horizontal drilling technology, which allowed the fracking of the shale deposits that lie in such abundance right across their continental shelf.
It is true that, as Trump says, the US has the largest share of these unconventional fossil fuel resources. US geological survey data shows they could keep those volumes flowing for at least the next 200 years, but using them all, as Trump threatened to do in his inauguration speech, would bring about our collective ruination.
There is no way around the physical reality of climate change. We have to keep all that carbon in the ground, rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. The fossil lobby are promoting carbon capture and storage as a solution to this climate limit, but those technologies are not economic, they are not developing with any speed and they are not yet available at any credible scale.
There are, however, other developments which can give us real hope. We won’t stop Trump just by vilifying his position or countering his nationalism with our own. What we need is better energy solutions, which can be deployed in every part of the world, so we also reduce conflict over energy resources and meet our sustainable development goals.
[ Trump’s first hours: With each stroke of the pen came seismic hammer blowsOpens in new window ]
Thankfully, such a solution is already at hand and is expanding exponentially. It involves cutting our fossil fuel demand by dialling up the renewable, battery storage and electric vehicle revolutions that have also evolved dramatically over the last 20 years. By investing in these alternatives, we can cut the legs from under the business case for “drill baby drill” and still deliver economic prosperity for all our people. This is the peace project of our time.
Europe may make a short-term deal with Trump to swap US gas for Russian imports, but the truth is we are going to go flat out for our own “green new deal”, even if the Americans postpone theirs. It is our only credible economic path and a way to make sure we are not subservient to American, Arab or Russian “energy dominance”. China is on the same course and is ahead of the game when it comes to manufacturing the new clean energy alternatives at scale.
Far from bringing a new golden age, the real risk under this Trump administration is that America will lose out in this new green industrial revolution. If it stops the clean energy tax credits that Biden introduced under his Inflation Reduction Act, then it is the Republican Red states which will lose out. A similar retreat from sustainable thinking would also put cloud-based tech companies in Democratic blue states at risk. They are currently betting big on the AI revolution, but the planned expansion of data centres in the US will see a further doubling of the gas used by that sector in the next five years. Is the rest of the world going to sit back and say we support those platforms, when they would be wilfully destroying our planet? I don’t think so, no matter how many crypto coins or smart algorithms they have in the palms of their hands.
It is not just abroad that Trump’s climate denialism will face opposition. The cost of climate impacts is starting to hit home in the US. In 2024, storms Helene and Milton each cost more than $50 billion and the LA fires are likely to cost a multiple of that. In the last five years, the number of homes without insurance tripled and in the last three years insurance premiums rose by a third, in large part because of a variety of climate impacts. Again it is the people who voted for Trump who may be most at risk, in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina and not just California.
As a US Senate budget committee report stated last month: “This is predicted to cascade into plunging property values in communities where insurance becomes impossible to find or prohibitively expensive – a collapse in property values with the potential to trigger a full-scale financial crisis similar to what occurred in 2008.”
Americans are not so different from people in the rest of the world. Polling consistently shows that two-thirds of the population are concerned about climate change. While the numbers for Republican voters is lower, the reality is that a large number of conservatives and people of faith have a profound concern about what is happening to our natural world.
[ Trump to withdraw from Paris climate agreement, White House saysOpens in new window ]
Trump has only a narrow majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate and there are 87 members of the conservative climate caucus who might not give him the numbers he needs to get legislation which weakens climate action over the line.
Perhaps politically the best way to avoid the worst outcomes is to try to turn the US president’s head by asking how he would really like to be remembered in history. Does he really want to be remembered as a peace builder as he said on Monday, or will he be seen more like Emperor Nero, who had great ratings in his day, who was a big man for the circus and games but who lost the support of his senate at the end and became known forever for fiddling while Rome burned? That is the historic precedent and end of all ages we now have to avoid.
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