Though I am not a Trump supporter,
I concede that Wright and Trump have some good points about the overly fast and
logistically challenging energy transition that the EU has embraced. I don’t
think it was very friendly to chastise the EU and Britain about it, though.
Wright says that they will need more fossil fuels and that they should buy them
from the U.S. (mainly LNG). Does that come with the Trump caveat of ‘or else we
will add tariffs’ as it often does? What if they find cheaper sources nearby or
domestically? Will they be penalized for then moving away from U.S. supplies?
These are the kinds of things they are likely to think about.
Trump is right that the EU
and Britain should continue to drill in the North Sea, where new oil and gas
reserves continue to be found. Existing production has been allowed to decline
without replacement, with assumptions that wind and solar could replace it.
They are likely over-leveraged toward renewables. This has led to high power
prices for consumers, decreased power reliability, and concerns about
preparation for extreme weather.
Of course, the EU plans
pre-2022 included more cheap Russian gas and oil, and the loss of that due to
the Ukraine war has hurt the continent, especially Germany. That was also a
major factor in the ‘deindustrialization’ that Wright refers to. It was not
really the EU’s lack of fossil fuel drilling but its plans to rely on Russia
that led to most of it.
Wright called for doubling
world oil production. That is a bit extreme, but we will need more oil in the
future. He had a discussion that included Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub. He
called renewable energy inefficient. He also criticized the EU’s Corporate
Sustainability Initiative. I do agree with that criticism. It would make it
harder for the U.S. to sell energy to Europe, and that makes no sense since the
U.S. already sells the most environmentally responsible hydrocarbons in the
world, in general.
Wright said the UK and EU
should reverse their net-zero policies. I think it can be assumed from
trajectories, costs, etc., that Net Zero 2050 is highly unlikely if not dead.
That does not mean net zero is dead, but that it just seems unlikely to happen
before 2050. Perhaps 2060 or 2075 would be better. Wright also criticized EU
rules on methane emissions and carbon taxes.
Trump mostly bashed wind
turbines, calling people who buy Chinese wind turbines “stupid people.” Others
point out that there are more immediate priorities that are more important than
climate change right now.
“At the World Economic Forum, far more attention was
paid to risks from climate than to other risks for many years,” said Sir Niall
Ferguson, the historian and Hoover Institution fellow. “Not that there aren’t
risks from climate change – but they’re not as clear and present a danger as
the risk from, say, Vladimir Putin.”
Wright noted that the U.S.
had prevented the closure of 17 GW of coal-fired capacity last year, helping to
meet AI-based demand increases. However, this is a bit misleading. Many of
those power plants are very old, inefficient, and have low utilization rates,
so the capacity numbers are not so relevant. The delays in many cases were only
for a matter of months. He is right that power demand is increasing in the U.S.
It is also doing so for the first time in quite a while. Wright noted:
“Most of these coal plants were ordered to close, just
like in the UK, for political reasons … Forget the rate payers, forget the risk
of blackouts, forget the closing off of opportunity for new data centres or
reshoring of manufacturing.
Wright even suggested that
the deindustrialization in Europe due to higher energy costs (from both net
zero policies - and decoupling from Russia – I add) may even result in higher
carbon emissions, especially if homegrown industries are replaced by Asian
coal-powered industries.
There was some backlash
against the green energy bashing:
"Now, the United States … have gone hard [for]
fossil fuels and kind of made anyone going for renewables feel like they're
woke, they're not looking after shareholders. Honestly, I'm here to tell all of
Davos, that is not correct," Andrew Forrest, founder of mining giant
Fortescue, told CNBC.
"It's an aberration that short-term people are
saying that," {Allianz CEO} Bäte told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe"
on Tuesday. "I think it's about doing it intelligently. And by the way,
the role model here is China, they are going to be the leader both in terms of
renewable and cost of energy."
I think it is likely that Europe will slow its energy transition a bit and backoff on its sustainability demands a bit. However, I think it is still committed to some kind of net-zero policy. It is also likely that Wright and Trump’s bashing and attitude that – you are doing it all wrong and we can fix it – won’t go over well in general. However, they are right about a lot of things. This is in contrast to Vice President J.D. Vance’s comments last year about European political parties. I do not think that far-right parties will be embraced there, though they may gain some footing here and there and perhaps win a few elections. I do not see such parties gaining much, and if the EU adopts better policies on immigration, those parties will fade faster, since bad immigration policies have led much to their rise.
Brian Murray, director of Duke University’s Nicholas
Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability, complained that keeping
coal units online longer is not an energy strategy, or as the article is
titled, ‘Coal by decree is not an energy strategy.’ He writes:
“These coal interventions ultimately may mean that a
handful of plants will run for a few extra months — but that’s not the greatest
danger to America’s economy, energy security, and well-being. The more serious
risk is that energy policy is being reduced to episodic exercises of emergency
authority, untethered from economics, planning, or climate reality.”
He argues that there are better and more economical ways to ensure grid reliability. Certainly, extending the life of these old plants is just a temporary emergency assurance, not a longer-term solution.
The EU is also becoming more dependent on U.S. LNG, which provides about 60% of its LNG imports. Dependence on a friendly country is not usually considered a problem, but with the current administration's actions of retaliatory tariffs and threats, some are comparing it to dependence on Russian supplies. They think the U.S. could use that dependence as leverage, like Russia often did. Supply diversification is one strategy, and developing more domestic sources is another for increasing EU enegry security.
References:
US
energy secretary calls for doubling global oil output in Davos. Reuters. January
22, 2026. US
energy secretary calls for doubling global oil output in Davos
US
ramps up pressure on UK to abandon net zero. Hans van Leeuwen and Matt Oliver.
The Telegraph. January 22, 2026. US
ramps up pressure on UK to abandon net zero
Top
business leaders issue an expletive-laced message on the green backlash. Sam
Meredith. January 22, 2026. CNBC. Top
business leaders issue an expletive-laced message on the green backlash
Opinion:
Coal by decree is not an energy strategy. Opinion by Brian C. Murray, opinion
contributor. The Hill. January 23, 2026. Opinion: Coal by decree is not an energy strategy
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