Trump’s “Drill, Baby, Drill” Energy Policy Will Enjoy the Enthusiastic Support of the Global South – Watts Up With That?

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Tilak Doshi

The inauguration of Donald Trump on Monday, January 20th as 47th President of the United States promises to dramatically change the trajectory of U.S. energy policies pursued by the outgoing Biden administration as well as the previous two-term Obama presidency.

In a speech and Q&A session on January 7th, the President-elect stated that both climate alarmism and Biden’s energy policies are “huge scams”; that he would terminate U.S. participation in the UN’s Paris Climate Agreement; that he would rescind Biden’s cynical permitting “pause” on LNG export infrastructure development allegedly to assess its impact on U.S. energy security and domestic natural gas prices; that he would do away with Biden’s EV mandates “very quickly”; that he would “un-ban” Biden’s blanket offshore oil and gas drilling ban; that he would rescind all the actions taken by the Biden regulators to disadvantage or ban gas appliances and stoves; and that he would unwind Biden’s offshore wind boondoggle. He has also vowed to rescind unspent funds earmarked for climate provisions contained in the euphemistically named, boondoggle-laden Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

It is of course too early to assess how quickly the incoming Trump administration can achieve these objectives. Vested interests, bureaucratic backsliding and the considerable resources of the climate industrial complex will seek to constrain the Trump administration’s energy policy ambitions.

But it would be a mistake to look at the Trump administration’s energy policy promises as the only hope in turning around what has been a decades-long onslaught against fossil fuels in the U.S. and Western Europe. Key developments in world energy affairs in 2024 suggest that a Trump administration will have important allies in Europe and around the world in its fight against the globalist climate agenda.

Europe’s deindustrialisation and the green backlash

The impact of Europe’s deindustrialisation – a process that began with Germany’s adoption of Energiewende in 2010 which sought to replace fossil fuels and nuclear power with solar and wind – became painfully evident last year. Germany’s Federal Statistics Office reported on January 15th that the economy contracted for the second consecutive year in 2024, highlighting the depth of the downturn gripping Europe’s biggest economy with few signs of any imminent reprieve. The avalanche of headlines on Germany’s economic and political implosion after Chancellor Olaf Scholz sacked his Finance Minister in November were only the latest in a series of reports over the past two years on the “sick man of Europe” (“Behind Germany’s Political Turmoil, a Stagnating Economy”, “Germany Is Unraveling Just When Europe Needs It Most”, “Europe’s Economic Apocalypse Is Now”) .

Sky-high labour and business operating costs, caused by the myriad regulations of over-reaching bureaucrats and among the world’s highest energy prices brought about by the follies of the EU’s and U.K.’s “climate leadership” policies of the past two decades, have cost Europe dearly. In 2008, the EU and U.S. economies were neck and neck. Today, the U.S. economy is 50% larger than its hapless ally across the Atlantic.

A growing ‘greenlash’ against the environmental agenda in Europe and U.K. – along with the rejection of mass immigration and the open-ended commitment to funding Ukraine’s war – has led to the rise of populist “far-Right” political parties. They have achieved significant success in regional and national elections in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, France, Germany and the U.K.

Geert Wilders, the political leader of the Party for Freedom which is in a coalition of four parties which constitute the Dutch Government, sounded positively Trumpian as he decried government spending on the climate and supporting Ukraine and the need to reduce taxes, stating: “I want us to finally put the Dutch first.”

Alice Weidel, leader of the German AfD party that has 20% voter support across the country, making it Germany’s second strongest political party, is yet another potential Trump ally. In one of her typically fiery speeches to the Bundestag, she said: “Germany is deep in recession… And it’s not Putin, not the world, not some fictitious climate disasters that are to blame for this. This incapable Government is responsible for the collapse…”

In an extended interview with Elon Musk – who will lead the Department of Government Efficiency in Trump’s incoming administration – Ms. Weidel spoke of Angela Merkel as the first “green” chancellor who “wrecked and destroyed” the country with its “obnoxious energy policy” which made Germany “the first industrial economy that unplugged nuclear power plants”.

Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform U.K. party which is now neck and neck with the ruling Labour Party on 25% in some polls, has long been a personal friend of Mr. Trump. Like Mr. Trump and reflecting most Reform U.K. members, Mr. Farage is skeptical about climate alarmism. His party manifesto states that Net Zero policies are “crippling our economy” so “scrapping climate change goals should be made a priority for the next government as it would save the public sector £30 billion per year for the next 25 years”.

There are other leaders in the EU that share Mr. Trump’s opposition to the fundamentalist beliefs of the climate church. Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban dismisses EU plans to tackle climate change as a “utopian fantasy”. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has pointedly stated that “ecology has been militarily occupied from the Left” and that “Greta Thunberg’s ideology will lead us to lose thousands of companies and millions of jobs in Europe”. Parties opposed to the unconstrained green climate agenda are now in governing coalitions in Finland, Sweden and Austria.

Energy pragmatists in the Global South

Ever since the first ever international forum devoted to the environment and climate change took place in Stockholm in 1972, the developed countries of the West have made climate policy a centrepiece in their international relations. From the earliest UN negotiations starting in 1992 at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit under the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), developing countries in the ‘Global South’ such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa had “common but differentiated responsibilities”.

This meant that the developed countries (primarily the West, but also its allies including industrialised Japan and South Korea) adopted commitments to reduce carbon emissions by specified amounts over a specified period. This was allegedly dictated by the Science^TM popularised by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change periodic “Summary for Policymakers”. The developing countries not only did not have any binding policy commitments but were expected to receive considerable support in “climate finance” to assist mitigating and adapting to climate change.

After almost three decades of negotiations at the Conference of Parties (COP) at the UNFCCC forum, the chasm that exists between the policy perspectives of governments in the collective West and those of the rest of the world that make up 80% of the global population is no closer to being bridged. The delegations from China and India among other developing countries at COP26 held in Glasgow in 2021 successfully insisted at the last minute that the forum’s final communique refer to a “phase down” not a “phase out” of fossil fuels. This was to ensure there was no watering down of their aspirations for higher standards of living which depend on reliable and affordable fossil fuel supplies.

At COP28 held in Dubai in 2023, the contradictions between the climate alarmists of the West (which included both government representatives and a vast phalange of environmental NGOs that are accorded semi-official status at COP meetings) and the energy pragmatists of the ‘Global South’ broke into the open and was widely reported in the media.

Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, the President of the COP28 climate summit and CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, said pointedly in an interview: “You’re asking for a phase-out of fossil fuels… Please, help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socio-economic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”

Nor is Dr. Al Jabber the only natural ally of the in-coming “drill, baby, drill” Trump administration. Al Jaber’s remarks were amplified by Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman who told Bloomberg that the world’s biggest oil exporter would not agree with Western demands to phaseout fossil fuels. “Absolutely not,” he said in an interview in Riyadh. “And I assure you not a single person – I’m talking about governments – believes in that… If they believe that this is the highest moral ground issue, fantastic. Let them do that themselves. And we will see how much they can deliver.”

Last year’s COP29 was held in Baku, Azerbaijan in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s victory in the presidential elections, much to the consternation of climate activists and a hyper-ventilating media around the world. The Financial Times saw Trump’s triumphant win as “a blow to global climate action” which would “cast a pall over the UN COP29”. Azeri President Ilham Aliyev, host of COP29, came out as among Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters, describing his country’s oil and gas resources as “a gift from God” and that oil and gas would be needed for “many more years”.

Upending green geopolitics

That the upcoming Trump administration will upend the green geopolitics pushed by the progressive environmental Left in the West is in no doubt. This was evident at the confirmation hearings for key nominees in the Trump administration which took place this week. Chris Wright, an oil executive and the nominee for Secretary of Energy, said this at his Senate hearing: “President Trump shares my passion for energy… if confirmed, I will work tirelessly to implement his bold agenda as an unabashed steward for all sources of affordable, reliable and secure American energy.” He continued:

There’s seven billion people in the world that don’t live lives anything like we do…They want what we have. And of course, they should get what we have. And through market forces and improvement and leadership, particularly leadership from the President-elect Trump, I think we’re going to see growing more abundant energy resource coming out of our country and hopefully out of the world so that everyone else can live lives like we do.

Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent was asked at his confirmation hearing about fears that President-elect Trump’s efforts to reverse gains made in green energy would favour China. He responded as follows:

China will build a hundred new coal plants this year. There is not a clean energy race. There is an energy race. China will build 10 nuclear plants this year. That is not solar. I am in favour of more nuclear plants. And I would note that the IRA as scored by the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] is wildly out of control in terms of spending on the upside.

Mr. Trump couches his promised energy policies in the mantle of “America First”. Yet in his ambitions to bring about a renaissance in energy production in the U.S., he enjoys the prospects of strong support from all corners of the world not beholden to the powerful lobbies of the globalist climate agenda.

Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is an economist, a former contributor to Forbes, and a member of the CO₂ Coalition.