Donald Trump to declare energy emergency, expanding powers

President-elect Donald Trump will use emergency powers to unleash domestic energy production and reverse Joe Biden’s climate actions, sources say.

He’ll do it all within hours of being sworn in on Monday and will force policy changes to allow new oil and gas development on federal lands and roll back Biden’s climate rules, sources tell us.

Many of the executive actions will start a long regulatory process but will touch every corner of the US energy industry from oil fields to car dealerships. They show Trump is going to make the federal government work for oil and gas production, a 180 from Biden’s fossil fuel curbs.

It’s not clear how an energy emergency declaration would be used but a president can use special powers to move crude and direct how electricity is generated and transmitted.

On the campaign trail Trump said he would declare a national emergency on energy, saying it was needed to increase production and address the growing demand from the AI boom. A Trump transition spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment but the president-elect himself mentioned it Sunday at the Capital One Arena.

“We’re going to be using our emergency powers to allow countries and entrepreneurs and people with a lot of money build big plants, AI plants,” Trump said. “We need twice the energy we have now and it’s going to be more than that.”

A national emergency allows a president to use as many as 150 special powers normally used for hurricanes, terrorist attacks and other unexpected events, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

It’s not clear, though, if Trump can use them to build more power plants. During his first term he tried to use special powers to keep unprofitable coal and nuclear power plants from retiring around the country by invoking emergency authority in the Federal Power Act that’s used for natural disasters and other crises. He failed.

That would be a 180 from Washington where environmentalists have been pushing Biden to declare a climate emergency and use it to stop oil exports and even domestic oil flow.