From Paris to Permian, Trump Restoring Rational Energy Policy

By Vijay Jayaraj

For too long, the conversation around energy policy in the United States has been dominated by a toxic brew of partisan rancor, media sensationalism, and international grandstanding. The far-left media are now driving a narrative that President Trump’s positions are an assault on reason itself. But the opposite is the truth.

What we’re witnessing isn’t a denial of science or a retreat from reality. It’s a bold, pragmatic recalibration – one rooted in economic foresight, scientific clarity, and a refusal to let America’s industrial supremacy be eroded by bureaucratic bloat and globalist agendas.

Back to Energy Dominance

Energy costs ripple through every corner of the economy. When electricity prices spike or fuel becomes scarce, manufacturers scale back, small businesses shutter, and families get pinched. For decades, the U.S. has enjoyed an enviable position as an energy superpower, thanks to fossil fuels and other natural resources, technological ingenuity, and relatively free markets.

Yet in recent years, that advantage has been jeopardized by a tangle of climate regulations, green subsidies, and international climate commitments that often prioritize political optics over practical outcomes.

Take the Paris Agreement, for example, from which Trump intends to withdraw a second time after Biden reversed a withdrawal during Trump’s first term. The agreement is billed as a scientific pact, but it’s a political one – riddled with loopholes for China and India, the world’s biggest CO2 emitters, while saddling the U.S. with disproportionate costs. The United Nations, which oversees it, has a long history of blending science with ideology. Its climate summits are as much about posturing as progress, with jet-setting delegates of powerful countries demanding sacrifices they won’t make themselves.

The Biden years featured a concerted push for “green” technologies – wind, solar, battery storage – coupled with a chokehold on oil and gas development. Agencies like the Department of Energy funneled billions into projects destined for failure, repeating on a larger scale the Solyndra debacle of the Obama administration. Meanwhile, the agency dragged its feet on permits for pipelines and terminals for liquefied natural gas exports.

Trump’s policy shift – emphasizing fossil fuel production, streamlining permitting, and pulling back from the dogmatic green agenda – offers a chance to pursue what works. This is a demonstration of rationality and a rejection of corruption and groupthink that has masqueraded as scientific consensus.

By unleashing domestic oil and gas production in places like the Permian Basin, Alaska, and offshore, Trump is betting on oil deposits that can supply the country for decades and natural gas reserves that can power the world. This isn’t nostalgia for a bygone era but a recognition that fossil fuels remain the most reliable, scalable, and cost-effective energy sources available today.

Far-Left Embraces Pseudoscience

The left accuses Trump of ignoring settled science. But what’s settled? Certainly not the doomsday script that demands abandonment of proven technologies in exchange for so-called renewable fads that make platform shoes look practical.

For years, the climate debate has been less about data and more about dogma. Almost all future forecasts on climate by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are based upon scientifically inaccurate assumptions about the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gases.

Even if the U.N.’s moderate emissions scenarios come to pass, global temperatures are predicted to rise only 2-3 degrees Celsius by 2100 – hardly an apocalyptic outcome and very likely a beneficial one.

Trump’s pledge to slash red tape is a war on waste. He’s betting that American industry, unshackled, can deliver cleaner, cheaper energy faster than any government mandate ever could.

Until recently dictated by fear, guilt, and globalist platitudes, energy policy is now on track to reflect reality and respond to the economic imperative for affordable power and the strategic need to stay ahead of the curve in a competitive and dangerous world.

This commentary was first published at BizPac Review on March 12, 2025.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.

4.9 24 votes
Article Rating

Discover more from Watts Up With That?

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

32 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Izaak Walton
March 13, 2025 11:26 pm

Trump’s policy shift – emphasizing fossil fuel production”

Is that the same policy that leads him to tell people to buy Teslas and buy one himself? And claim that the people organising boycotts are “domestic terrorists” — apparently free speech only applies when directed towards people Trump dislikes.

Reply to  Izaak Walton
March 14, 2025 12:07 am

Smashing windows and doors, molotov cocktails, occupying premises, vehicles destroyed and set fire to, physically destroying and defacing other people’s businesses.

Yes.. That is domestic terrorism !!

There is absolutely no other words for it.

Do you really condone these actions !!

MarkW
Reply to  bnice2000
March 14, 2025 11:58 am

Only if they are against people he supports.

Mr.
Reply to  Izaak Walton
March 14, 2025 3:01 am

How irrational and risible are people who reject Tesla because Elon, but then go and buy a Chinese made EV?

Does their logic run something like –
“I don’t want an EV made by an alleged dictator (Elon), I want an EV made by a REAL dictator (Ji)?”

Reply to  Mr.
March 14, 2025 3:09 am

And they destroy the recharging infrastructure, which was pitiful to start with…

.. Shows just how DUMB they are.

Interested Observer
Reply to  Mr.
March 14, 2025 3:55 am

Their “logic” (if you can call it that) runs like this:

“I must do everything my political overlords tell me to do because, my brainwashing is so deep I will never see the light of reason.”

They wear their cognitive dissonance as a badge of courage.

Hoyt C Hottel
Reply to  Mr.
March 14, 2025 4:11 am

How reliable would a Chinese ev be. During Mao’s time steel making was a cottage industry. How could China overtake the West in such a impossibly short time. During the cultural rev0ltion China practically shut down

MarkW
Reply to  Mr.
March 14, 2025 11:58 am

That’s because China already has the type of government that they want for this country. With themselves in charge, of course.

Reply to  Izaak Walton
March 14, 2025 4:33 am

So Trump buying a Tesla is an attack on Free Speech?

Boycotts? Where?

There is a lot of Far Left billionaire money going out to fund these “people organizing boycotts”.

The good news is the Trump administration is going to expose these domestic terrorists for who they are.

Did you see all those professional protestors at Trump’s hotel yesterday? Trump now has all their names. All those people will be investigated. If they are engaged in a criminal conspiracy, they will be prosecuted. If they are not American citizens, they will be deported.

The judge temporarily holding up Trump’s deportation of one of the leaders of the Columbia University riots should read the law. It’s not up to the judge to decide if this guy can stay or go. According to the U.S. Constitution, the Secretary of State has SOLE discretion as to whether a non-citizen can stay or go. If the Secretary of State believes the person is a threat to the United States, then the Secretary can have him deported, and nobody can say different. Some district federal judge is not going to change that. This is election interference, on the part of partisan Far Left Democrats, and their Far Left activist judges, plain and simple.

Supporting deranged Far Left Zealots is not a good look. They lose an election and they go crazy. Have you seen these fools lately?! Who would want crazy people like this governing them? Not me! I want crazy people like that as far away from me as possible.

Sparta Nova 4
Reply to  Tom Abbott
March 14, 2025 5:17 am

Remember the Cabinet Secretary who wore a dress and stole women’s luggage at airports?

Reply to  Sparta Nova 4
March 14, 2025 6:29 am

Remember Bribe Me Joe and Kackles kneeling for BLM with their black face diapers affixed?

Sparta Nova 4
Reply to  karlomonte
March 14, 2025 8:18 am

Yes.

Remember when BLM had an insurrection, a real insurrection, in Portland or the 10 months of riots, burning, vandalism, and looting?

Defund the police. Got it.

Reply to  karlomonte
March 14, 2025 8:21 am

And the FBI, and Nancy Piglosi and other congress critters?

0perator
Reply to  Izaak Walton
March 14, 2025 4:58 am

Someone firebombs your dwelling. “Free speech”. You’re an idiot.

Sparta Nova 4
Reply to  Izaak Walton
March 14, 2025 5:15 am

This is a serious swing and miss. You need to go back to the batting cage.

First, it was not a policy.
Second, he was not telling people what to do.

It could be viewed as a counter protest to those calling for Tesla boycott and setting fires and defacing property and shooting guns through showroom windows.

starzmom
Reply to  Sparta Nova 4
March 14, 2025 6:04 am

Two years ago, all these same people were buying Teslas because they believe in the EV mandate. Now, they are literally attacking Teslas because they don’t like Elon anymore. They have lost the ability to reason.

Reply to  starzmom
March 14, 2025 7:43 am

They have lost the ability to reason.

Respectfully disagree. They can’t lose something they never had in the first place.

Sparta Nova 4
Reply to  Phil R
March 14, 2025 8:18 am

Agree.

MarkW
Reply to  Izaak Walton
March 14, 2025 11:57 am

Standing in a park, holding a sign, is a protest.
Invading someone else’s property and breaking things is a crime.

One of these days the left will learn the difference.

Calling for the death of those who disagree with you is domestic terrorism, it isn’t free speech.

Greg61
Reply to  Izaak Walton
March 14, 2025 12:15 pm

Free speech applies to citizens, not domestic terrorist Nazi sympathizers.

March 13, 2025 11:30 pm

An eloquent piece but I cannot let this go to the keeper:

Even if the U.N.’s moderate emissions scenarios come to pass, global temperatures are predicted to rise only 2-3 degrees Celsius by 2100 

It would have been better without this bit. By now, everyone should realise that CO2 has negligible impact on Earth’s energy balance.

If it worked the way the models assumed, then the Southern Ocean would not have been cooling for the last 45 years; the Nino34 region would be warming when its not; snowfall would not be increasing, Greenland would not be gaining ice extent or elevation.

Reply to  RickWill
March 14, 2025 5:09 am

“Even if”…

used to say that if something is the case or not, the result is the same

Even if the alarmists are correct, AGW is still a big, fat nothing-burger.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/even-if

Sparta Nova 4
Reply to  David Middleton
March 14, 2025 8:19 am

Proof of intelligence on the planet Earth!

March 14, 2025 1:21 am

The thing is to stop people conflating climate policy and energy policy. Insist on calling things by their right names.

Policy on technology and energy use are not climate policies. Moving from oil, gas and coal to wind and solar is not a climate policy. Its an energy policy which may or may not be justified by its effects on climate. Replacing ICE cars with EVs is not a climate policy. Its a transport policy.

The way to do this is to insist anything labelled a climate policy specifies what effect, in quantitative terms, it will have on the global climate. So for instance requiring net zero in generation in the US will have no effect on climate. Neither will moving to EVs. They are not climate policies, they are energy policy or transport policy.

Its essential to keep saying this. You want to do X because climate? Tell me how many degrees C it will make a difference.

The classic activist tactic is to take some policy with no or trivial effects on emissions – like the UK NHS eliminating supposed GHGs from anesthetics – and call this a climate matter, but with no quantification, thus bypassing discussion of how sensible a thing it is to do and how useful it will be in affecting the climate.

Then of course you have the barking mad, as in the little Norfolk UK town of Thetford, where the Town Council is trying to make Thetford a Net Zero town. That is neither a climate nor an energy policy. Its an outbreak of mental illness, probably caused by something in the recycled water supply….

https://eastangliabylines.co.uk/politics/local-government/thetford-no-plan-to-curtail-movement/

https://www.breckland.gov.uk/article/16484/Current-and-future-actions

Mr.
Reply to  michel
March 14, 2025 3:05 am

But, but, but –
it’s the VIBE.

Sparta Nova 4
Reply to  michel
March 14, 2025 5:20 am

The optimum means to sway public opinion is to create fear and anger.
Now that the population is emotional, intellectual conversations transform into activist rhetoric.

Sparta Nova 4
Reply to  michel
March 14, 2025 5:26 am

Back during the Viet Nam conflict there was a meme going around that we should not withdraw because that would mean all those young men died in vain.

That caught on and was hard to reverse.
The realities are:

They are dead and remain dead regardless of whichever course of action is taken. Shall we increase the casualty list?

The moral imperative of conducting a war is not derived by the casualties. It a war is justified (and that rarely is the case) on moral grounds, then the number of casualties is also justified. If the war is not justified, end it and accept the casualties as a sunk cost for a huge mistake, admit the mistake, and remediate in a responsible manner.

The morality and ethics missing during the Viet Nam conflict have not been restored in the passing of decades. Sad.

Reply to  Sparta Nova 4
March 14, 2025 8:24 am

South Vietnam could have ended up just like South Korea: A prosperous, anti-communist ally of the United States.

All that would have been required to accomplish this goal would have been for the United States to leave combat troops in South Vietnam to ensure that the Paris Peace Accords were followed.

Unfortunately, for the South Vietnamese and the American troops who fought and died to save them from communist oppression, at the end of the war, after North Vietnam had been defeated and had withdrawn their troops back into North Vietnam, the U.S. government was in control of Far Left appeasers like Joe Biden (yes, he was screwing up the United States way back then) and Edward Kennedy, and they, along with their Far Left Democrat majority refused to leave any American troops in South Vietnam as insurance against further invasions from the North.

Joe Biden and the other Far Left Democrats in Washington DC threw South Vietnam to the wolves, just like President Joe Biden threw Afghanistan to the fanatic Islamic wolves. They are directly responsible for the death and displacement of literally MILLIONS of innocent people.

Visiting Americans are treated very well in South Vietnam. South Vietnamese refugees who made it here to the United States, after the war, are some of the most patriotic Americans you will find anywhere.

Conservative policy saves the day, and then the Radical Left throws it away. That’s the story of U.S. foreign policy. Joe Biden and his merry band of radicals is just the latest example of Far Left Democrats being unfit to govern.

MarkW
Reply to  Tom Abbott
March 14, 2025 12:11 pm

It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of refugees died trying to escape Vietnam after the communists took over.

Greg61
Reply to  Tom Abbott
March 14, 2025 12:20 pm

The parallels with today are incredible. Back then anything Nixon did was bad and had to be reversed by the demonrats, regardless of consequence. Same now with Trump. The demonrats are insane and unhinged.

Sparta Nova 4
Reply to  Tom Abbott
March 14, 2025 12:48 pm

It seems Biden repeated the Viet Nam foul up in Afghanistan.

Sparta Nova 4
March 14, 2025 5:11 am

The only true way technology can advance is if the economic engine is running smoothly.
At some point we will run out of coal and hydrocarbon fuels. This does not dictate a mandatory step transition to alternatives. It does require vision to evaluate what is on the horizon and to properly evaluate and analyze nascent technologies and economically pursue the most economically viable.

At the moment we are going through major disruptions. Unfortunately it is necessary given the past decades of complacency and maintaining the status quo. The immediate result is people are beginning to talk, to discus, to evaluate. This cannot help but produce new ideas and better ways of doing things.