Executive
It’s ‘Drill, Baby, Drill,’ Yet Time to ‘Chill, Baby, Chill’ on Lower Prices
Drill, baby, drill is all very well, but prices will take time to come down, if they do at all. Trump can at least hold them steady.

The energy policy of the incoming Trump administration seems as concise as it is clear: Slash domestic energy costs under the mantra, popularized in 2008 by GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, of “Drill, baby, drill!” While a RealClearInvestigations canvass of energy experts suggests many of them foresee long-term benefits in that approach, it’s less clear to them that consumers will see immediate change.
Drill, baby, drill – but prices won’t come down right away
In other words, Trump may not deliver in 2025 on his campaign pledge to “cut energy prices in half within 12 months.” On the other hand, given expected huge increases in energy demand, a more aggressive approach to exploiting domestic resources should help keep prices steady and buttress affordability in the long run.
“‘Drill, baby, drill’ is a soundbite, really, that stands for increasing domestic energy production from reliable sources, meaning located in the United States and not subject to geopolitical shocks and other disruptions,” said H. Sterling Burnett, director of climate and environmental policy at the Heartland Institute, a free market think tank long supportive of the oil and gas industries.
One thing everyone agrees on is that the Trump administration is likely to continue the whipsaw of 21st-century energy policies of the United States. From Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden, and now back to Trump, the U.S. has zigzagged between the conviction that global warming threatens the planet, requiring a wrenching and expensive shift from fossil fuels, and the belief that society is better off when energy is abundant and affordable.
Oil and gas extraction is now more efficient
Despite his campaign warnings of insufficient energy supplies, Trump will take office with high domestic oil and gas production. Since the new year, the price of oil has hovered around $75 a barrel, roughly equivalent to what it was a year ago and down from the more than $130 a barrel price it hit at the midpoint of President Biden’s term. It’s true that Biden’s policies limited energy exploration on federal lands and banned some liquid national gas exports, but American energy companies have refined their techniques, allowing them to tap more from existing sources.
Consequently, the Trump administration will be trying to goose production at a time when environmentalists insist it is unnecessary, and with inflation still percolating it may be difficult to deliver lower prices in the near term.
Trump conceded last month that “it’s hard to bring things down once they’re up, you know, it’s very hard,” but added: “I think that they will. I think that energy is going to bring them down.”
“I will declare a national emergency to allow us to dramatically increase energy production, generation and supply,” Trump stated on the campaign trail. “Starting on Day 1, I will approve new drilling, new pipelines, new refiners, new power plants, new reactors, and we will slash the red tape.”
They can do it, but…
All of that is doable, experts said, but energy markets are nothing if not unpredictable. Even as the U.S. enjoys a relatively ample supply of energy, new warnings have emerged about the ravenous energy demands of artificial intelligence and data centers that are at the forefront of technological innovation. Moves that put the U.S. on more solid production footing are expected to benefit consumers by stabilizing prices while also leaving the nation more secure in its energy future, according to supporters of Trump’s outlook.
“There are levers he can pull that will remove the disincentives to drill,” said Mark Mills, executive director of the National Center on Energy Analytics (NCEA). “At current prices it might not be that attractive to drill, and of course Trump wants to bring down prices so there’s a natural tension between those objectives.”
Still, optimism is high among energy mavens sympathetic to Trump’s approach. As analyst Alex Epstein told commentator Jordan Peterson in a conversation made public Tuesday, “I’ve been at this 17 years now, and it’s definitely at a peak in terms of enthusiasm and opportunity in this sphere.”
Biden’s Parthian shots to prevent Drill, baby, drill
Biden’s departure will leave an energy sphere shifted toward renewables by design rather than free market forces. While Trump’s victory last November would seem to indicate a majority of Americans agree with his design, the Biden administration is going down swinging on its position that global warming is an existential threat, and ramping up efforts to limit oil and gas production in the U.S. Through an executive order on Jan. 6, the administration banned exploration in 625 million acres of saltwater, covering the east and west coasts, much of the Gulf of Mexico, and some stretches on the Alaskan coast. Left-wing environmental groups that cheered the sweeping move insist Trump will be unable to reverse it.
Such parting shots are of a piece with Biden’s entire term, which began with a raft of executive orders designed to shut down oil and gas projects under Trump, and consistent maneuvers to limit lease sales and permits, starve the fossil-fuel industry financially, and pump hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into various green energy schemes. Biden’s anti-oil-and-gas strategy, coupled with his gigantic spending initiatives, triggered the worst U.S. inflation in decades.
At war with the oil and gas industry
Biden also deep-sixed the previously approved Keystone XL pipeline to pump oil from Canada’s tar sands to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast; offshore exploration on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) has stagnated, and new liquid natural gas projects were paused. In 2024, the government held no offshore lease sales for the first time in 42 years, and in their final weeks Biden’s team offered the legal minimum of Alaskan sites for auction.
“The Biden administration was at war with our industry,” said Mike Moncla, president of the Louisiana Oil & Gas Association. “Industries with expensive long-term projects like offshore exploration and LNG [Liquified Natural Gas] are looking for certainty in the marketplace.”
Environmentalists made much of what they called tepid interest in the recent Alaska lease auctions. But industry executives said the low interest was more attributable to the limited nature of the auctions and the fact Biden officials chose the least attractive sites from a geological perspective. In addition, while it is true domestic production is at a record high, the total is only a fraction greater than it was in 2019 before the COVID lockdowns.
Trump can restart extraction on a dime
Just as Biden canceled or paused oil and gas initiatives when he took office, Trump can restart them on Jan. 20 in keeping with the nation’s 21st-century energy policy zigzag. In addition, Trump is expected to again withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, and the U.S. is unlikely to remain an eager participant in the various conferences the global warming alarmists hold in farflung cities.
While climate change activists have raised alarms about such moves, supporters of more gas and oil exploration note that over the past 15 years, no country has reduced its carbon dioxide emissions more than the U.S., in large part because of the transition to natural gas from coal. “The Trump administration should easily be able to just start approving LNG permits again,” said Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research. “The greens will likely sue based on the bogus study the Department of Energy released, but it won’t hold up to scrutiny.”
In addition to disengaging from United Nations-led climate agreements, Trump could take three other moves that would indicate Washington will end its hostile stance toward fossil fuels, Burnett told RCI. Two of those would involve holding regular lease sales as required by law, and laying down specific timeframes for the conclusion of the permitting process.
Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant!
Third, and most significant, would be rescinding of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Obama-era “endangerment finding,” regarding greenhouse gases, according to Burnett and others. Should the EPA drop that measure, which put a heavy thumb on the scale in favor of renewable energy by labeling CO2 harmful, the oil and gas industry would prosper.
There is other low-hanging fruit likely to be plucked via a “drill, baby, drill” mindset, which experts said would help signal the U.S. is committed to abundant energy now and in the future. The office of “climate czar” which was created by Biden and which has adamantly refused to break down how it spends its money could be shuttered, along with the “environmental justice” offices Biden implanted in various government agencies.
While some projects like the Keystone XL pipeline appear to be dead, holding more lease sales, ungumming the permit process, and removing regulatory obstacles would all send clear signals the U.S. would be open for business for oil and gas production. In addition, federal lawyers could end litigation or decline to defend against lawsuits that might be filed against regulations pushed through during Biden’s term, according to energy experts. Trump could also replenish the Strategic Petroleum Reserve drawn down by Biden since 2022.
Not oil alone
Chris Wright, the executive Trump has nominated as energy secretary, is a former oil executive who participated in the fracking boom, but he has long championed policies that would increase all forms of energy, including renewables and nuclear. Similarly, his interior secretary nominee, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, is expected to slash regulations and open up more opportunities for exploration and mining on federal lands.
What the Trump administration does do with energy will not be confined to oil. This month Trump announced a $20 billion foreign investment in building data centers here in the U.S., a part of the technology explosion linked to artificial intelligence and a development that will require enormous amounts of energy. The juice for such projects comes from natural gas, not oil, and green lights on LNG pipelines and facilities from the Trump administration would facilitate them.
A recent report by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a nonprofit research organization that seeks to “reduce energy waste and combat climate change,” predicts that new data centers, manufacturing facilities, and electric vehicles will require a vast expansion of the electric grid during the next decade.
“A data center can be built in 12-18 months and it needs power 24/7 so windmills aren’t going to do it,” Mills said.
Drill, baby, drill – at home
Yet another component of “drill, baby, drill” would be geared toward ensuring futures markets and U.S. independence, according to Mills and others. After curbing domestic oil and gas, Biden was put in the uncomfortable position of rattling the U.S. energy cup before Saudi Arabia, a regime he had been sharply critical of, and nations generally hostile to the U.S. such as Venezuela.
Such foreign policy contortions would be avoided by ramping up domestic production, and it might also insulate the U.S. from “black swan” events that can send shockwaves through global energy markets. It’s unclear, for example, what will happen with supplies from Iran if Trump, as expected, ratchets up sanctions on the Tehran theocracy that Biden relaxed, or if Israel were to extend its bombing campaign against Iran and target the mullahs’ export facilities.
The situation in Ukraine and relations with Russia present another factor. Of the four major pipelines Russia used to supply Europe with most of its energy, only one, that running farthest south that comes up through Bulgaria and Romania, is still active. Thus, increased domestic production and supply would cushion the U.S. from possible adverse impacts on global markets and also provide more profit and jobs via exports.
“Policies of restriction are bad for consumers and our national security,” Pyle said. “The street is fickle, they saw money in ‘green’ but they’ll go wherever the money is.”
Abandoning ESG
Trump’s pro-industry outlook is also aligned with recent market tradewinds, which have shifted away from the “environmental, social and governance” investing that leftist groups and Wall Street firms like BlackRock had pushed. Since the end of 2023, some $14 trillion was withdrawn from such funds, and in the new year many big banks and investment companies, such as JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Bank of America have announced their departure from the “ESG” fold. Republican governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis have also fought against left-wing investing by pulling huge state pension funds from managers that embrace those trends.
“People are obviously concerned about the price at the pump and the cost of electricity, but it’s important that the government gives the industry a clear signal that the policy environment will be reframed to ultimately benefit American consumers,” said Dustin Meyer, a senior vice president at the American Petroleum Institute. “I think there’s a lot more interest in energy exploration than there was four years ago. The new administration should mark a return to the long-established, bipartisan consensus that energy production is good for the U.S.”
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
James Varney is an author at RealClearInvestigations.
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