Analysis
‘Green New Scam’ – Trump collides with energy reality
Trump used Davos to challenge Europe, which now generates nearly half its energy through solar. The president: ‘We have more coal than anybody. We also have more oil and gas than everybody.’
Donald Trump has other fossils on his brain beside his views: on Thursday, he made his openly climate denialist and pro-fossil fuel orientation abundantly clear in his address via videoconference to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
For the benefit of the audience, and aimed at Europe in particular, he showed his hand by mentioning a conversation he’d had with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman: he called the Gulf oil magnate “a fantastic guy” because the heir to the throne in Riyadh promised new investments in the United States of $600 billion over the next four years. The U.S.-Saudi relationship is based on U.S. government debt securities, held in great quantities by the Saudi central bank.
Most likely, the U.S. president also asked bin Salman to lower the price of oil, a request Trump said he also had for OPEC. “You've got to bring down the oil price. … They should have done it long ago,” Trump said, stressing that he believed that “if the price came down, the Russia-Ukraine war would end immediately.” It’s all fossil geopolitics – the same grounds that led him to attack Canada, which, if it were up to him, should become a new state of the U.S.: the North American neighbor is also a major oil producer, but Trump doesn’t want to depend on anyone else; he would rather go for annexation.
“I declared a national energy emergency – and that's so important – a national energy emergency to unlock the liquid gold under our feet and pave the way for rapid approvals of new energy infrastructure. The United States has the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we're going to use it. Not only will this reduce the cost of virtually all goods and services, it will make the United States a manufacturing superpower and the world capital of artificial intelligence and crypto,” boasted Trump.
While answering questions coming from executives of major players in the fossil fuel economy, such as TotalEnergies, he also had high praise for coal, the most polluting of fossil fuels, which he called ”a great backup,” adding that “we have more coal than anybody. We also have more oil and gas than everybody.”
In his address, Trump also boasted of terminating the Green New Deal, which he called “the Green New Scam,” as well as the “insane and costly electric vehicle mandate,” stressing that “we're going to let people buy the car they want to buy.”
This message was particularly addressed to Europe, which on Thursday in Davos showed a very different stance in the speech of European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen at the launch of the Global Energy Transition Forum: “Europe stays the course and we stand ready to work with all global actors to accelerate the transition to clean energy.”
“The world is moving faster than ever towards clean energy,” von der Leyen recalled. “Last year alone, global spending on clean energy hit a record $2 trillion.”
We don’t yet know when and if the two agendas will end up on a collision course (meanwhile, on Thursday, Trump also reiterated that the U.S. will sell liquefied natural gas (LNG) to European countries, a fuel source in which some states like Italy are investing), but it is certain that Europe seems to be moving further and further away from the fossil-fuel-based society that the new U.S. president is dreaming of: in 2024, for the first time, solar panels generated more electricity in Europe (11%) than coal (10%), while wind (17%) generated more electricity than gas (16%) for the second year in a row.
By 2024, the strong growth of solar, combined with the recovery of hydropower, brought the share of renewables to nearly half of the EU’s electricity generation (47 percent). Fossil fuels generated only 29 percent of the EU’s electricity in 2024. Just five years ago, by contrast, fossil fuels provided 39% of the EU's electricity, while renewables provided 34%. The path leading toward the energy transition is clear; what Trump is doing is trying to sling enough mud to make it impassable.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/lindustria-green-e-un-imbroglio-lorizzonte-fossile-del-presidente on 2025-01-24