You are all rich enough, he said, to raise a billion dollars to bring me back to the White House. At the dinner, he pledged to rescind dozens of President Biden’s environmental regulations and policies and prevent new ones from being approved, according to other people familiar with the meeting, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a personal conversation.
Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.
The LedeReporting and commentary on what you need to know today.
The leaders responded. A fracking king named Harold Hamm (who had first supported Ron DeSantis in the primary) has taken the lead, talking regularly on the phone. “Harold just sticks his finger in the ground and the oil will come back,” Trump explained admiringly. at an event. But in this case, he put his finger on his phone and what came out was cash. The Post again: “Hamm is working ‘incredibly hard to raise as much cash as imaginable from power. We earn the most checks from other people we’ve never earned a dollar from before. ‘
As I said, no one shakes their heads anymore in the face of all this. It is corruption, but a type of corruption legalized through the Supreme Court, in Ciudadanos Unidos and in other decisions; We begin to take it for granted that government force will be used on behalf of the bidder.
The corruption of language, however, is slightly different. Trump—a master at directing the focus where he wants it to be—also used Monday’s signing sessions to declare a “national energy emergency.” This, one aide says, will “unlock a variety of different authorities” that let him make these changes more easily—but the main effect is simply to muddy the waters. Because there is no energy emergency. America has been producing oil and gas at record levels—indeed, oil-industry players have been pointing out, in the past few weeks, that they don’t really want to see more drilling, as that would drive prices down. (Trump’s executive orders, by halting the leasing of federal waters for offshore wind farms, would effectively limit the amount of energy the country could potentially generate.)
This energy emergency supposedly stems from a need to provide more power to data centers, so that we can beat China in developing the grail of artificial intelligence. “The national-energy emergency is crucial because we are in an A.I. race with China, and our ability to produce domestic American energy is so crucial such that we can generate the electricity and power that’s needed to stay at the global forefront of technology,” a Trump official, speaking not for attribution to reporters, said, on the morning of the Inauguration.
But—all doubts about the utility and urgency of developing A.I. aside—if this were the new Administration’s real goal it would actually want to leave fossil fuels behind. At the end of 2024, a Silicon Valley team that included researchers from Stripe, Anthropic, Tesla, and elsewhere produced a report showing that solar microgrids are by far the fastest way to build the power that data centers need. “Estimated time to operation for a large off-grid solar microgrid could be around 2 years (1-2 years for site acquisition and permitting plus 1-2 years for site buildout), though there’s no obvious reason why this couldn’t be done faster by very motivated and competent builders,” the report states. That’s because essentially all you have to do is put up a bunch of solar panels and some batteries and run a wire to your data center—not build a huge centralized power plant and connect it to the grid. The report continues, “Off-grid solar microgrids offer a fast path to power AI datacenters at enormous scale. The tech is mature, the suitable parcels of land in the US Southwest are known, and this solution is likely faster than most, if not all, alternatives.”
The actual emergency, obviously, is with the climate. The past two years were the hottest ever recorded. In 2023, Canadian fires filled American skies with choking smoke; 2024 saw Hurricane Helene devastate southern Appalachia; 2025 dawned with the Los Angeles inferno. For years, activists tried to persuade Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency, mostly in an effort to focus attention and action on the crisis. Biden instead worked hard to build out clean energy through the Inflation Reduction Act, virtuous work that got him, and the climate crisis, almost no attention at all.
So now we find ourselves at an Orwellian moment, almost a Seussian one. Our leader has declared a fake emergency about energy, so that we can do more of something—drilling for oil and gas—that causes the actual emergency now devastating our second most populous city. It’s entirely possible that Trump’s gambit will succeed in confusing voters, and it’s almost certain that it will confuse much of the media, which has a history of following whatever squirrel he lets out of the cage.
But it is unlikely to fool the Chinese, who are bringing renewable power faster than anyone else. And it will almost certainly not succeed in confusing the planet’s glaciers and polar ice caps, which will continue to melt, or its forests and grasslands, which will continue to burn, or its seas, which will continue to rise. When we need to describe the folly of our leaders, we evoke the example of King Canute, striking the sea with his scepter to hold back the waves. Canute, however, was more cunning than our own old edition of the legend: he really sought to show his flattering courtiers that his strength had limits. The twelfth-century English historian, Henry of Huntingdon, says that as the water passed, Canute declared, “Let all men know how empty and insignificant is the strength of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, except He that heaven, earth, and sea obey eternal laws. He then hung his golden crown on a crucifix and never wore it again, “in honor of God the Almighty King. “
Trump, of course, conveys the opposite of this pious and humble message. He confuses attention with truth (just as Biden confuses truth with attention). It’s an emergency, okay. ♦
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