Trump Is Cementing the Green Energy Transition He Loathes
A new ESG — economics, security and geopolitics — will drive countries around the world to invest in renewables.
Too big to stop.
Photographer: Brandon Bell/Getty Images North America“Energy dominance” is shorthand for President Donald Trump’s agenda to use fossil fuels as a tool of international leverage, with the energy transition a casualty along the way. Its unintended consequence will be to strengthen the foundations of that transition, outside of the US anyway. Because even if environmental, social and governance thinking is canceled in Trump’s America, his blending of energy policy with a chaotic realignment of US foreign policy brings to the fore an ESG favorable to the transition: Economics, security and geopolitics.
Oil became the world’s biggest energy source during the post-1945 era of increasing globalization backed by US military muscle. Countries that might have been otherwise reluctant to base their prosperity on a fuel produced in remote, often volatile neighborhoods like the Middle East could draw comfort from the world’s biggest navy policing the oceans on everyone’s behalf. It helped that most of the big economies outside Moscow’s orbit were US allies and that Washington’s stake in this arrangement increased along with its own oil import dependency.