Telegraph Piece: Trump’s 2nd Term Energy Agenda: Not a Return to ‘Drill Baby Drill’

With a presidential election looming in 2024 and Donald Trump far outpacing all competition in the Republican party field and leading incumbent Joe Biden in many recent polls, boosters of the energy transition and Joe Biden’s Green New Deal-based energy policies are growing concerned that a second Trump term would see a gutting of his agenda. The Financial Times recently reported such concerns focus specifically on the potential Trump might target some of the green subsidies and tax breaks contained in the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Other than vague sloganeering on the campaign trail, Trump hasn’t really focused on energy policy specifics to date, but there is little question he would bring in a set of senior officials and advisors whose energy views differ strongly with those of Biden officials. A new Trump team would probably set out to try to rebalance the national energy equation by going after some IRA policies, especially those whose real cost likely far exceeds the legislative score placed on them by the Congressional Budget Office in 2022. Where the green subsidy provisions in the IRA came with an official price tag of $369 billion over 10 years, some estimates are that their real cost to the federal budget could well exceed $1 trillion.

As he did in the initial months of his first term, Trump would also seek to roll back much of the Biden regulatory and permitting agenda that has sought to hamstring the domestic coal and oil and gas industries. The Biden agenda has become so wide-ranging and impactful that it has emboldened the International Energy Agency and private sector analysts to start talking about the likelihood of achieving “peak oil” demand before 2030.