President-elect Donald Trump could soon become the first president to declare a “national energy emergency.”
Trump said recently that he plans to make the declaration on his first day in office as part of a series of energy announcements aimed at fulfilling his campaign-trail promises to lower energy costs for consumers and expand domestic fossil fuel production.
“I will sign Day One orders to end all Biden restrictions on energy production, terminate his insane electric vehicle mandate, cancel his natural gas export ban, reopen ANWR in Alaska — the biggest site, potentially anywhere in the world — and declare a national energy emergency,” Trump said in December.
The last president to declare an energy emergency was Jimmy Carter, who in 1977 called U.S. efforts to confront a domestic energy crisis the “moral equivalent of war.” Carter famously wore a sweater in another 1977 speech in which he stressed conservation to combat energy shortages.
Carter stopped short of declaring a national energy emergency, according to a report on presidential emergency powers by the Brennan Center for Justice. He did, however, declare regional energy emergencies in Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Oregon and Pennsylvania.
The president can use emergency powers to temporarily suspend air pollution requirements in the event of energy supply problems. As he granted governors’ requests to suspend environmental regulations, Carter urged them to tread carefully, “since such regulations are important to protect public health.”
A Trump declaration — which could be the first-ever national energy emergency declaration — is expected to look very different.
The Carter administration “tried to strike a balance between using emergency powers to address immediate crises and maintaining long-term environmental and regulatory standards,” said Scott Segal, a partner at Bracewell who represents a range of energy companies.
“While regulatory relief was occasionally used to expedite critical projects, Carter’s broader strategy emphasized transitioning to a more sustainable and independent energy system, rather than relying solely on emergency measures,” Segal said.
Trump may use emergency authority more narrowly, focused on “just increasing fossil fuel production,” he said.
Unlike the energy shortages during the Carter administration, “we have relative energy abundance if we can maintain it,” Segal said. “And while the energy system is more efficient today, electricity consumption is likely to increase due to artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency and manufacturing onshoring.”
Trump and his team haven’t elaborated on the specifics of what an emergency declaration could entail, although a memo considered by the Trump team in 2018 but later abandoned could offer some clues about their plans.
Under that plan, the Department of Energy would have declared an “emergency” and used existing authority to order utilities to buy two years’ worth of power from coal and nuclear generators most at risk of shutting down.
Trump has promised that the United States will build new power plants and lower energy costs as he vows to ease environmental permitting requirements. China is “already building electric facilities — big, bold electric facilities,” he said earlier this week. “They’re being fired up with coal. And we’re going to build bigger and better ones.”
Energy and environmental experts are waiting to see how Trump might seek to use his emergency powers to expand energy production. The conversation marks a major shift from recent years during the Biden administration, when the president faced pressure from the left to declare a national climate emergency. The Biden administration considered making a climate emergency declaration but never did. President Joe Biden said that “practically speaking,” he had done so, citing the climate policies his team put into place.
An official emergency declaration from a president can unlock additional executive powers, whether it’s deemed an energy or a climate emergency.
The president “does have broad authorities under the National Emergencies Act (NEA) and ‘emergency’ is not defined by Congress, so the president likely has broad authority to declare an emergency,” said Mark Nevitt, a professor at the Emory University School of Law.
That could potentially involve declaring a grid security emergency or halting trade of outside energy sources to the United States, Nevitt said.
The nature of Trump’s “energy emergency” is “a mystery to me,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.
“U.S. oil and gas production is at an all-time high. There are no gas lines or widespread electricity blackouts,” he said in an email. “The blackouts we do see are mostly caused by extreme weather events (cold, heat, hurricanes, wildfires) that are worsened by climate change and that will grow more severe as a result of Trump’s energy policies.”
An energy emergency declaration, Gerrard said, “would give Trump very few additional substantive powers” and “would not really advance his ‘drill, baby, drill’ agency other than rhetorically.”
