
Last week, newly inaugurated President Donald Trump issued a deluge of executive orders, including one declaring a national energy emergency.
“An affordable and reliable domestic supply of energy is a fundamental requirement for the national and economic security of any nation,” reads the order. “…our Nation’s dangerous energy situation inflicts unnecessary and perilous constraints on our foreign policy.”
The order enables emergency powers to accelerate domestic energy production and infrastructure. Emergency powers include the Defense Production Act (DPA), a wartime emergency power, and eminent domain (a power against property rights), bypassing environmental regulations.
“While I agree wholeheartedly with the president as to the problems, the solution poses problems of its own,” Jon Sanders, Director of the Center for Food Power and Life at the John Locke Foundation (JLF), told the Carolina Journal. “This ‘emergency’ is open-ended, like other, recently declared emergencies that open broad powers to an executive outside of the normal checks and balances of a democratic republic. Gov. Roy Cooper’s Covid-19 emergency and his subsequent, ad hoc, and arbitrary and capricious orders provided a thorough object lesson into the dangers.”
Former President Biden campaigned on reducing reliance on the oil and gas industry, taking early steps such as canceling the Keystone Pipeline and halting new oil and gas permits and leases on public lands and offshore. However, the latter action was later overturned in court and delayed through administrative measures.
Meanwhile, environmental activists frequently use legal challenges to block energy projects, often resulting in costly delays or cancellations such as the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, planned to run through eastern North Carolina but was ultimately scrapped in 2020.
At the same time, federal and state governments have strongly promoted intermittent and “green” energy sources like solar and wind that have proven less reliable when most needed. As a result, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), in its latest 10-year outlook, has warned that more than half the country—including North Carolina—faces a risk of energy shortages within the next decade.
In North Carolina, former Gov. Roy Cooper’s Clean Energy Plan, which he put forth in 2019, committed the state to a 70% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 2005 levels by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2050, according to JLF.
In 2021, The North Carolina General Assembly passed HB 951, which took Cooper’s goals and made them law.
Though the law and plan are based on the inherent assumption that electricity emissions in North Carolina continue to rise; in fact, emissions have been falling since 2005, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration.
“In short, Biden’s executive overreach combined with these bad-faith actions has not only brought about America’s domestic energy problems but also prompted Trump’s executive overreach in reaction,” concluded Sanders. “There’s a lesson in there, but I worry that what the political class will draw from it won’t be that it would serve people better to de-escalate, discuss these issues in good faith, and let the market pick winners and losers. What’s more likely that the next Democratic administration will overreach in response, having decided that the “real” lesson in all this is that might makes right.”
The post Lessons from America’s energy crisis first appeared on Carolina Journal.
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