Trump’s Pro-Oil Policies: Driving Climate Instability, Energy Security, or Both?

As I argued in an earlier blog post, the outset of the second Trump administration will likely have similar dynamics in energy and climate diplomacy strategy as witnessed during his 2017 to 2021 term. Likely on tap are 1) a withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords, 2) a reorientation of climate and energy offices at the State Department to emphasize traditional national security issues, and 3) a stronger use of energy sanctions as tools of economic statecraft.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the world that Trump officials will inherit from the Biden administration in January represents a marked evolution—and an escalation—of the global trends that faced the original Trump team. Global geopolitical instability has produced a world more chaotic than the first Trump era, and the corresponding state of climate and energy realities is no exception.

On the climate front, global warming continues to drive an increase in extreme weather events both at home and abroad. According to the Fifth U.S. National Climate Assessment, “hurricanes have been intensifying more rapidly since the 1980s,” and they are “causing heavier rainfall and higher storm surges.” The back-to-back onslaught of Hurricanes Helene and Milton that wreaked havoc across the Southeastern United States just weeks before election day provide a stark reminder.

And climate destruction doesn’t discriminate on partisan grounds. Remember that the states most affected by this season’s hurricanes included Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina—all red states. Beyond our nation’s borders, climate impacts pile up from the devastating floods ravaging the Spanish coastline to reports from the World Meteorological Organization that 2024 is set to become the hottest year on record. With the COP29 outcome in Baku, this month criticized from many quarters as “too little, too late,” don’t expect climate diplomacy alone to ride to the rescue in the coming years.

What do all these worrying trends mean for a Trump climate policy?

Probably not a whole lot.

Based on promises on the campaign trail and actions taken during his first administration, climate policy will certainly be deprioritized compared to the climate-action-focused Biden administration, replaced by a concentration on energy production-centric policy proposals.

Domestically, the Trump administration will return to reprioritizing increased domestic fossil fuel production yields—despite the fact that the U.S. is already the leading oil producer on the planet and that, as of 2023, crude oil production reached an all-time high under the Biden administration of 12.9 million barrels per day. Compare that to the previous production pinnacle during Trump’s first term, when the U.S. reached production levels of 12.3 million barrels per day in 2019.

Let’s put those numbers in perspective: the U.S. Energy Information Agency reported earlier this year that for the past six consecutive years, the United States has “produced more crude oil than any nation at any time” in history.

This superlative is unlikely to satisfy Trump officials, who will strive to drive production levels even higher, achieved by federal support to reducing barriers that could curb expansion for hydrocarbon producers themselves, as well as opening more federal lands to fossil fuel production through a relaxation of regulations currently blocking their use for oil and gas exploitation.

To justify such deregulation, the second Trump administration will almost certainly focus on the economic and energy security impacts of such a policy shift. After all, further U.S. increases in production can help drive an increase in global energy competition and a corresponding decrease in price levels for consumers and industry.

In terms of energy security, the increase in production will provide increased optionality for those nations currently dependent on authoritarian nations for their primary energy supply, such as those still importing Urals-grade crude oil from the Russian Federation. To this end, the Trump administration would have a significant opportunity to bootstrap the increase in oil market fungibility resulting from further U.S. production gains, to increase macroeconomic pressure on the Putin regime to relent in its continued aggression toward Ukraine and hybrid warfare against the West should supporters of a strong foreign policy stance enabling Ukrainian victory win out in the still-forming Trump cabinet.

Further increases in U.S. oil production could be operationalized to heap pressure on Moscow if coupled with a much-needed reduction in the current Urals crude oil price cap on the Russian crude grade that was first instituted in December 2022.  At the time, the price cap was set at a level of $60 per barrel by the G7, European Union, and Australia—but has languished unchanged at this high level for the past two years, despite Russia’s establishment of a “shadow fleet” full of vessels evading the cap, and repeated calls from experts to lower the cap level and step up enforcement.

So while Trump’s “drill baby drill” policies will do little to support the world’s climate efforts, this movement could have some positive impacts on geopolitical stability by offering more competitive oil to nations that have heretofore continued to feed Russia’s coffers through oil purchases that bolster Moscow’s war of aggression toward Ukraine and give more latitude for new Russia oil sanctions in the process.

Benjamin Schmitt

Senior Fellow, Kleinman Center and SAS

Benjamin Schmitt is a joint senior fellow at the Kleinman Center and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Penn. He is also an affiliate of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and associate of the Harvard-Ukrainian Research Institute.