Fact-Free Climate and Energy Policy in 2025—and Beyond?

In trying to decide what to write about the jarring reversals ahead in climate and energy policy, I looked back at a talk I gave eight years ago on that subject. Then, I had five limited “hopes” for what could help blunt the impact of reactionary policies.

Today, I have four—and they are even more limited. Hope is much harder to hold onto in a fact-free world.

Trump has promised, for example, to literally take the facts out of government decision making by dismantling or privatizing federal scientific agencies.  

The subject of fossil fuel production is another fact-free zone. Trump has promised to dramatically increase oil and gas drilling (especially on public lands), decimate EPA’s budget, roll back environmental regulations like those on methane emissions from oil and gas development, and greenlight more liquid natural gas export terminals and pipelines. It’s unclear whether oil executives coughed up all of the $1 billion in campaign contributions Trump demanded for doing so.

Trump promises that these moves will cut energy prices in half within a year. But that’s highly unlikely.

Oil and gas are global commodities, and no supplier—even the U.S., the world’s top producer of oil and natural gas—can control prices. In reality, reducing them will cut into industry profits. Cutting prices in half would require a global depression.

The U.S. is already the world’s leading LNG exporter, supplying almost half of EU imports. And they’re declining. But the EU requires exporters to measure, monitor, report, verify—and most importantly, reduce—their methane emissions. Unless the EU folds (and ESG drivers go away), the industry will still have to reduce emissions.

So, the oil and gas industry will be deregulated, prices won’t fall, production won’t change much—and industry profits will soar.

Trump will likely pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accords. The international impact of that is uncertain. But the climate won’t cooperate with official denial. We’ve already exceeded the 1.5 degree warming threshold. Climate disruption will get much worse, much faster. The laws of physics and chemistry can’t be repealed.

Neither can the laws of economics—my first hope. Markets, innovation, and the potential of energy efficiency all favor a zero-carbon future. Distorting and stifling markets to allow incumbents to hang on could come undone, at least to some degree, from market forces.

My second hope is that the world is moving to clean energy—though not fast enough. How durable will support be for moving in the opposite direction, and ceding jobs, innovation, investment, and whole markets like EVs to other nations?

Third, the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was, indeed, bipartisan. The laws have benefitted red states the most, and funded efforts like building new nuclear power, and building a domestic critical minerals supply chain. Will all that be surrendered?

My fifth hope in 2016, ironically, was public will. Obviously, a non-starter today.

These four hopes are very limited. Maybe even naïve. They won’t prevent fact-free policies from being imposed, or from inflicting severe climate damage. They won’t stop the loss of the momentum we had promisingly built in the last four years in confronting the existential, triple planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, and growing a clean energy economy.

Today, just like eight years ago, much of the nation is facing a drought. I have a feeling this one will be worse and tougher to get out of. So will a drought in rational climate and energy policy.

John Quigley

Senior Fellow, Kleinman Center

John Quigley is a senior fellow at the Kleinman Center and previously served on the Center’s Advisory Board. He served as Secretary of the PA Department of Environmental Protection and of the PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.