Chris Wright, the secretary of the Department of Energy, did not deny climate change in his Senate confirmation hearing. “The solution is to evolve our energy system,” he said. “I am for all energy systems that can better human lives and reduce emissions.”
But what he really meant is what he said to industry insiders as reported by Abraham Lustgarten of Propublica, “No. 1 is, get out of the way of the production, export and enhancement of our volumes of coal, oil and gas.” Yes, they cause climate change, he has repeatedly acknowledged, “but,” he has stated, “it amounts to an inconvenient complication.”
“The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side effect of building the modern world. Everything in life involves trade-offs,” he added.
And then there’s Lee Zeldin, the new Environmental Protection Agency secretary. As he stated in a recent EPA press release on March 12th, “The EPA is removing all climate policy and charting an aggressive path of deregulation. Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen. We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”
And let’s not ignore Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget. He’s also the key author of Project 2025. As reported by vital signs.edf.org, Vought strongly advocates for the “existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch including eliminating the independence of federal agencies regardless of what elected legislators decide.”
What underlies this concerted action is not only to minimize action on climate change but also to remove all climate change considerations from agency protocols. The result is that in federal policy, climate change is no longer important. It is collateral damage. The goal now is energy dominance, but what does energy dominance even mean?
One of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders was “Unleashing American Energy.” This executive order seeks to establish U.S. energy dominance by supporting traditional energy exploration, including on public lands, by eliminating regulations, and fast tracking permitting. Trump also declared a national energy emergency stating that the critical minerals identification, energy leasing, development, production, transportation, refining and generation capacity of the U.S. is far too inadequate to meet the nation’s needs.
The truth is that there is no energy emergency as Natural Resources Defense Council Editorial Director Jenny Shalant recently clarified, “The United States is the world’s leading producer of oil and gas and a leading exporter too. We ship out more oil than Saudi Arabia, Russia, Ecuador, Venezuela and any other Petro state.”
So, what is this energy emergency based on? There is no current international emergency. And interestingly, our major purchaser of liquefied natural gas is China who resells it at a profit. Most of us know the real emergency is climate change.
Aside from appeasing wealthy donors, there is another aspect to the movement to increase our energy production at all costs. To be dominant in artificial intelligence we need to have abundant sources of cheap energy. David Berreby, writing for the Yale Environment 360 report, details the effect of AI tools on energy consumption as well as water consumption. The International Energy Agency projects that the AI data centers electric consumption in 2026 will be double what it was in 2022, roughly the equivalent of Japan’s total energy consumption. Those numbers will only dramatically increase as AI use increases.
So, if the U.S. would like to be dominant in AI, our country will need to increase its energy production. We all know that energy production could be dramatically increased by promoting solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear energy. We could be AI dominant without contributing to climate change, but that is not the tact that this administration is taking.
What is next? You can expect the current government will soon be promoting the positive benefits of global warming. There will be less mortality from cold waves because there won’t be cold waves. Spring may occur earlier in some regions. Some plants in the short term may benefit from increased carbon in the environment, and maybe they’ll just learn to be more drought tolerant. And of course, we need Greenland because it has critical minerals needed for AI, so we have to dominate the Arctic as well.
Published on May 4, 2025, in the Albuquerque Journal.
© Judith Polich. All Rights Reserved. May be republished with author’s written consent and proper attribution.