US President Donald Trump’s tariff-induced chaos may be the only thing impeding his goal to “drill, baby drill” as he unleashes an unprecedented attack on environmental protections and climate change initiatives, reports the Guardian.
In Trump’s first 100 days in office, the US president has gutted key federal agencies at the forefront of the climate crisis, fired climate scientists and regulation experts, and taken more than 140 actions to weaken or rescind environmental rules and escalate fossil fuel use.
The count, tabulated by The Guardian, exceeds all rollbacks made during his firm term, compounded by the firings of many involved in implementing what protections remain. The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Trump, Lee Zeldin, praised a round of 31 actions in a single day as a “dagger to the heart of the climate religion,” referring to a popular Evangelical myth that concern for the environment is anti-Christian.
Evangelicals supported Trump in droves in 2024, with roughly 8 in 10 white Evangelical voters casting a ballot for the president. Fossil fuel companies, meanwhile, spent big based on Trump’s promise to torch environmental regulations strengthened under his predecessor, shelling out US$445 million on Trump and congressional Republicans in the 2024 election.
Oil and gas companies are seeing dividends on their investment just 100 days into the new Trump administration. His Democrat predecessor, Joe Biden, had implemented a wide array of policies and investments targeted at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and accelerating clean energy development in the US. (Despite this, the country still led the world in oil and gas power, becoming the biggest fossil fuel producer in history under Biden.) Taking office, Trump promptly declared an “energy emergency” to open even more public land and federal water to drilling.
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“The uptick in embodied emissions from forecast US oil and gas production is worrying,” Olivier Bois von Kursk, policy adviser at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, which tracks emissions projections from the lifetime of projects using data from research consultancy Rystad Energy. “The world can’t afford more climate chaos,” he told the Guardian.
Last year was the hottest ever recorded, supercharging natural disasters around the world and underscoring the collective failure of governments to respond to the problem. But while Trump’s approach will make the situation worse, with little hope of Congress or the courts stepping in to curb his most extreme efforts, ironically the thing that may end up hobbling “drill, baby, drill” is Trump himself.
Despite Trump exempting oil and gas from his chaotic trade war, the industry is still feeling the pain from tariffs on materials like steel and the looming fear of recession amid the ongoing trade war. In early March, the price of crude briefly dropped below US$60 a barrel, the threshold for profitability, and Trump’s pressure campaign on oil cartel OPEC to increase production is likely to keep prices low.
One executive surveyed by the Federal Bank of Dallas lambasted the administration’s “chaos” as disastrous for the commodity market while another lamented, “I have never felt more uncertainty about our business in my entire 40-plus-year career.”
The tariffs have already “completely shattered” industry expectations, Claudio Galimberti, chief economist at Rystad, told the Guardian. Attacks on renewable energy projects, which overwhelmingly benefit Trump-voting areas, as well as four-digit tariffs on solar panels have also thrown the US clean energy sector into an uncertain future under Trump.
