Trump Is Creating a New Energy Paradigm. It May Be Hard to Undo

This year began with a series of bangs. First, the capture of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela followed by a commitment by President Trump to “run” the country and rejuvenate its oil industry. Less than a week later, President Trump signed a presidential memorandum to take the U.S. out of the United Nations climate body (UNFCCC) that is tasked with negotiating a path to address the issue. 

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There is a lot to parse in these two moves. And questions abound. For example, are international oil companies willing to spend tens of billions rebuilding Venezuela’s oil infrastructure? And how might a legal debate shake out about whether the U.S. can rejoin the UNFCCC in the future without Senate approval?

But for now, I want to focus on a signal amid the noise: Trump is making a perhaps surprising degree of progress creating a new energy and climate paradigm. 

This new paradigm isn’t necessarily one where the rest of the world stops its decarbonization push or where the emissions spiral totally out of control. But it is one where the incentives in the U.S. might durably tilt against clean technology and the friction to reversing course becomes increasingly difficult.   

Let’s start with Venezuela. There are so many ways things could go awry. But let’s consider what would happen if Trump’s vision were realized and the U.S. was able to jump start the country’s oil industry. Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Analysis from Rystad Energy suggests that with proper investment—around $180 billion—the country could plausibly pump 3 million barrels per day by 2040. In today’s rankings, that would make it a top five oil producer. Even if most barrels are years away, the expectation of future abundance can shape today’s capital allocation and politics.

More supply helps keep prices low. And, if the U.S. were to control Venezuelan crude as Trump hopes, it would reduce the vulnerability of prices to OPEC’s machinations. Trump has long insisted that he would like to see crude oil at $50 per barrel. (The U.S. benchmark price is currently just under $60 per barrel.)  That’s a price so low that it provokes a combination of eyerolls and indignation from oil executives behind closed doors: lower prices mean lower profits.

But cheap oil helps ensure a long-term future for the commodity—particularly for the U.S. where it is abundant both domestically and in the Americas. It also allows businesses to feel reassured that there will be a secure energy supply in a time of geopolitical tensions. With cheap oil, however, the case to go electric becomes harder to make.

None of this is certain. First off, aligning politics, capital, and logistics to actually build out the Venezuelan industry is a long shot. If crude prices are sustained at too low a level, the U.S. risks harming its own oil industry. Moreover, a future administration could do a complete U-turn, leaving Venezuela to coordinate with OPEC. 

But there’s also no guarantee that a future administration—even a Democratic one—would reverse course. From a national security and competitiveness lens, in the race to develop clean technologies the U.S. faced a steep uphill battle to catch up to China even before Trump took office. He has made the battle hill even steeper. To rely on clean technologies, at least in the next decade, means relying on China. And the politics in the U.S. may not support either party trying to shake off oil if prices are low. With an economy that is persistently reliant on crude, pursuing policies that raise energy costs risks angering constituents. That was true before Trump’s moves in Venezuela; successfully restoring the country’s oil exports could reinforce that dynamic.     

Trump’s decision, meanwhile, to leave the UNFCCC was less shocking than his gambit in Venezuela. He toyed with the idea in his first term, and many expected such a move when the U.S. didn’t show up to the U.N. climate conference in Brazil last fall.

Climate groups decried the move as out of step with scientific reality. That is true, of course. But the U.S. leaving the UNFCCC is a reflection of the current political reality. Behind closed doors, many internationally focused climate leaders have expressed a sense of relief at the prospect of the U.S. leaving. The process no longer will need to be held hostage to U.S. domestic considerations—or be at risk of the U.S. trying to impede it. 

“The rest of the world will likely shrug this off as the U.S. shooting itself in the foot and undermining its own interests,” Nat Keohane, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, tells me. “But in the longer run we know from experience that both multilateral cooperation and American interests are best served when the U.S. engages internationally.”

That’s true in so far as the U.S. is aligned with the goals of the rest of the world. That is certainly not the case now; it’s also not a fait accompli that it will be in the next administration. The process of rejoining the UNFCCC—and the political debate that it would inevitably entail—only makes it that much harder for the U.S. to quickly realign on climate action.

In removing Maduro, Trump hammered home his administration’s turn to the Western Hemisphere—which he has termed the “Donroe Doctrine.” The U.S., according to its National Security Strategy, will focus in particular on shaping the Americas while implicitly leaving others to shape their own spheres of influence. That principle may end up applying to the energy and climate landscape, too.

The U.S. will obviously remain a global player in energy and beyond in the coming decades. And energy—at least fossil fuels—moves globally, meaning U.S. policy will have an effect on the rest of the world. 

But U.S. oil wealth and influence doesn’t have the power to derail the global energy transition. The U.S. only generates about 12% of global emissions today. Analysts project that the country’s emissions will roughly flatline under current policies: coal will continue to decline with solar and gas replacing it. The rest of the world is where emissions are most at risk of growing.  

In many places, clean technology—produced by China—is the cheapest and fastest way to build new sources of power. And China may be seen as a less risky trading partner than the U.S. Even in the U.S., utilities and power companies will take power wherever they can get it, which today often means quickly building solar panels. 

Current leadership in Washington can’t halt the transition. But it can make U.S. participation in the green transition more politically and institutionally expensive each year.

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