It looks as though Trump will be President. Can he deep-six Net Zero green energy plans?

President Joe Biden’s spontaneous self-combustion in Thursday evening’s debate with former President Donald Trump has dramatically increased the odds of a second Trump presidency starting next January. The wind in the race was already at Trump’s back going in, but Biden’s appearance, voice, and performance were so distressing that even his most loyal media shills at CNN and MSNBC were encouraging him to withdraw from the race before the night was over.

It seems likely that Biden, a fixture of Washington DC’s political scene for half a century, will reject such calls and remain the party’s nominee through the November election.  Thus, now seems a good time to examine some of the ways a Trump presidency might go about repairing much of the damage the Biden administration has done to America’s energy security.

There will be no more “pauses” on permitting for critical energy infrastructure. It’s far too late to do anything about Biden’s incredibly damaging cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office. That’s a given. But rescinding the Biden White House’s ill-considered pause on permitting for LNG infrastructure would be among many moves Trump would make on his first day in office.

Throughout his presidency, Biden has invoked dozens of executive actions designed to hinder expansion of America’s oil, natural gas, and coal industries. Most, if not all of those will be cancelled early in a second Trump term. The leasing program on federal lands and waters that has been so restricted and tilted against minerals development would be restored to normal order under the traditional “multiple use” principle quickly. Artificial permitting delays invoked by regulatory agencies like FERC and the Bureau of Land Management would be quickly corrected.

The problem with executive actions such as those and many others in the US system is that they are easily revoked by the next administration or cabinet secretary. They would become the low hanging fruit the Trump team could use to show dramatic action in the first 100 days, but they are not permanent change.

Rescinding or modifying regulations is a tougher nut to crack. Such efforts are subject to the Administrative Procedure Act, a set of process requirements that are every bit as Byzantine and time-consuming as the name of the law implies. This will be a heavier lift, but Trump and his team proved it can be done with even the most complex of regulations in their first term in office. Their successful re-write of the Obama era Waters of the United States regulation – which sought to give EPA authority to regulate every body of water in the country, including drainage ditches and city road design – is proof.

Democrats will no doubt roll out fright messages to the faithful about Trump wanting to repeal all the green energy subsidies contained in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and 2021 Infrastructure law, but that’s nonsense. First, doing that would require a 60-seat GOP super majority in the Senate, and that is not in the cards. In addition to the Senate filibuster, the legislative process provides the minority party an array of tools to delay or kill unwanted actions.

Trump has repeatedly said that, while he would take a look at some of the costly IRA provisions, he has no intention of attempting to repeal that bill. Many funders of both the Trump and Biden campaigns are already benefitting from some of those incentives and would oppose efforts to repeal them. Politics in Washington is the art of the possible, and a full repeal of the IRA is not possible.

Just as they did throughout Trump’s first term in office, Democrats and their supporting NGOs would respond to all these efforts with more rounds of the lawfare tactics that have become a staple of the Democratic party’s political playbook over the last decade. Such efforts can delay reform efforts by months or even years, but most would likely fail, especially given the makeup of today’s US Supreme Court, with its 6-3 constitutionalist majority.

Pleasingly, Donald Trump would not maintain a costly office of “Climate Envoy” staffed by someone with the radical views of a John Kerry or John Podesta. In fact, he would likely eliminate the function entirely. A Trump presidency will also be far less likely to sign the US onto globalist resolutions invoked at WEF or COP conferences each year, as Kerry was prone to do.

The bottom line here is that a second Trump presidency would without doubt bring significant change to US energy and climate policy, just as the first Trump presidency achieved. But such change is unlikely to become radical since the array of checks, balances and safeguards inherent to the US constitutional system mitigate against radical change during Democratic and Republican presidencies alike.