As Trump Declares ‘Energy Emergency,’ Environmentalists Stress Worsening ‘Climate Emergency’

During his first day in office, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a flurry of executive orders that could bolster the fossil fuel industry amid mounting losses from the climate crisis

Soon after he was sworn in to his second term as U.S. president, Donald Trump issued more than two dozen executive orders that touch on nearly every facet of U.S. policy, from immigration to national security. 

Several of the directives have profound implications for the climate, promising to further ratchet up oil and gas production while slashing initiatives directed at reducing the country’s soaring greenhouse gas emissions. Though legal and congressional barriers could lie ahead, experts say Trump’s executive orders indicate a swift and aggressive departure from the climate progress seen under the Biden administration. 

“Energy Emergency”: At Monday’s inauguration, addressing a crowd of politicians, tech moguls and celebrities, Trump promised that the “golden age of America begins right now.”

A large part of his plan to kickstart this era? Further tapping into what he calls the “liquid gold” hiding underground: oil and gas. 

“We will drill, baby, drill,” Trump said. “America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have—the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth—and we are going to use it. We’ll use it.” 

During his speech, Trump declared a “national energy emergency”—a presidential first, though his team has not yet elaborated on the specifics of what it could entail, NPR reports. He says the administration’s goal is to reduce energy costs for Americans and secure “dominance” in the space. However, as The New York Times points out, domestic oil production reached an all-time high in 2024. Natural gas prices dropped last year to their lowest annual average on record, when adjusted for inflation. 

“It’s not clear what the emergency is,” Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told the Times. “The U.S. is producing more oil and gas than ever before, more than any other country in the world, we have no gas lines, we have no widespread electricity blackouts.” He called the emergency order “mostly performative.”

At a recent Senate confirmation hearing, Trump’s choice for Interior secretary, Doug Burgum, stressed a concern over the electricity grid’s reliability in the U.S. in the face of increasing demand from tech companies to power artificial intelligence. 

“Electricity is at the brink. Our grid is at a point where it could go completely unstable,” he said. “We’ve got to get to work in permitting reform and speeding permitting right now.”

Global Impacts: Several of the executive orders targeted Biden’s past climate-related policies, with one stating that “climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.” (However, a wide body of research shows that climate change itself is worsening inflation.) 

In addition to the emergency declaration, Trump issued several other energy-related executive orders, including directives to stop approvals of new wind farms on federal waters and potentially many on land, revoke much of the federal support for the sale of electric vehicles and restart reviews of new liquefied natural gas export terminals—a process that the Biden administration paused in 2024. 

These orders still face potential legal challenges in courts or regulatory hurdles from Congress, which could deny funding and limit enforcement of Trump’s energy policies. Still, Congress is now in Republican control. 

While fossil fuel companies are celebrating Trump’s moves, environmentalists are speaking out against his proposed expansion of oil and gas, key contributors to global warming. Last year was the hottest in recorded history. 

“There is no energy emergency,” Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “There is a climate emergency.” 

Trump’s flurry of executive orders also extend to international policy. He announced on Monday that the U.S. will withdraw from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accord (again). He called the global climate treaty an “unfair, one-sided Paris climate accord rip-off.” 

Though it will take a year for the Paris agreement withdrawal to become official, experts say the move could influence other world leaders to back away from their climate goals, a trend my colleague Marianne Lavelle reported on after Trump’s win in November. This shift comes as climate disasters compound around the world, including the wildfires still raging through California.

A winter snowstorm hit the U.S. Gulf Coast this week, setting snow and ice records, including the first-ever blizzard warning in Louisiana. Around 4 inches of snow have fallen in parts of New Orleans, exceeding the January snowfall so far in Anchorage, Alaska, Andrew Freedman reports for Axios. Climate change isn’t just turning up the heat: It’s also contributing to weather whiplash, including unusual snow events.   

“This will be an historic snowfall for the Gulf Coast,” meteorologist Paul Douglas wrote on X. He added that in many parts of the region, “there are no plows — they will pretty much wait for the snow to melt (which happens later this week).”

Meanwhile, climate activist Muhammad Zain Ul Haq is fighting a looming deportation from Canada for the second time in under a year, Karan Saxena reports for The Narwhal. Haq, who goes by Zain and helped lead campaigns for campus fossil fuel divestment and to prevent deforestation, has been arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience about 10 times in Canada. The Canadian government threatened to deport him in April, which my colleague Keerti Gopal covered, but his case was deferred—until recently. Now, the government has given him a new removal date of Jan. 25., which climate activist groups are trying to appeal. 

Haq says that he applied for a six-month temporary residency permit in 2024, but that the immigration agency claimed they couldn’t locate the application. In a statement provided to ICN this week, the Canada Border Services Agency did not comment specifically on Haq’s case, citing privacy reasons, but said the agency only issues a removal order “once all legal avenues of recourse that can stay a removal have been exhausted.”

As ocean temperatures rise, the relationship between marine predators and their prey is increasingly falling out of sync, which could cause problems up and down the food chain, Andrew S. Lewis reports for Yale Environment 360. Lewis points to the shifting spawning and foraging behaviors between the striped bass and some of their favorite prey—tiny Atlantic menhaden fish—off the New Jersey and New York coast. 

“I don’t know if this is a larger cyclical pattern, if it’s driven by how they’re managed, or if it’s because the water temperature is increasing,” Janelle Morano, a doctoral student at Cornell University who has been studying how menhaden distribution has changed along the U.S. East Coast over time, told Yale e360. “But something is going on, and it is real.”

Cover photo: U.S. President Donald Trump delivers his inaugural address after being sworn in. Credit: CHIP SOMODEVILLA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images