Good news, our nightmare of long lines at gas stations and rolling blackouts are over. A country just starved for energy but completely kneecapped by red tape and bureaucratic requirements will suddenly be able to find the coal, oil, and gas we need to power our everyday lives. Praise be.
“The United States cannot afford to wait,” said Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, in a press release announcing the gutting of several decades-old laws in service of that wholly imagined scenario. The DOI will “accelerate” permitting procedures for energy projects — a very particular subset of them — in response to Trump’s day-one executive order declaring a “national energy emergency” that very, very obviously does not exist.
“Our Nation’s current inadequate development of domestic energy resources leaves us vulnerable to hostile foreign actors and poses an imminent and growing threat to the United States’ prosperity and national security,” that order reads. The “emergency” supposedly allows Burgum and the DOI to more or less undo the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act in order to turn a years-long process into a weeks-long one.
The degree to which the US is not suffering from any such lack of resources is impossible to overstate. Though the electric grid absolutely needs upgrades, it has something like a 99.95 percent reliability; outside of weather disasters, your home’s heating and cooling will work as needed; you can fill your gas tank whenever you feel like it. The country produced more oil and gas in 2024 than any country ever has, in the history of both countries and of oil and gas. It will likely break those records this year.
The DOI permitting announcement is specifically targeted at projects relating to oil, gas, and coal, along with uranium, biofuels, geothermal energy, hydropower, and “critical minerals.” Notably absent, of course, are the country’s and the world’s fastest growing energy sources, solar and wind power. Burgum is relying on the emergency declaration to develop “alternative arrangements” for compliance with NEPA, the ESA, and the NHPA — a dystopian bit of doublespeak that amounts to capping environmental reviews at between 14 and 28 days, skipping Fish and Wildlife Service consultation entirely, and quickly ignoring comment from tribal and other parties affected by the projects.
There is actually bipartisan agreement on the need for some sort of permitting reform, but this clearly doesn’t qualify. The administration is ordering under-construction wind farms to stop building and putting up every possible roadblock to renewable energy development, laying bare the blatant lie at the heart of the “emergency” declaration.
“Interior’s plan proves that Trump’s fabricated energy emergency is a hoax designed to ram through new fracking and coal mining,” said Randi Spivak, the Center for Biological Diversity’s public lands policy director, in a statement. “These so-called emergency procedures are nothing but grease on the skids for corporate interests to speed approvals that will harm people’s health, our public lands and the climate… This is a lose-lose deal for everyone but Trump’s industry cronies.” The group has promised to sue to stop the move.
As with all of Trump’s fossil-friendly moves, the companies he is so eager to help will only drill or mine or build if it makes economic sense to do so. With a level playing field (well, the fossil-tilted existing playing field, at least), the dropping costs of renewables along with the realities of the global oil market would discourage much new exploration and new drilling; making the permitting process a rubber stamp could change some of those bottom lines. Your lights will still be on and your gas tank full regardless, but at least the global thermostat will tick up a bit higher and a few rich people might get a bit richer.
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