We have forgotten a little of what it is like to try to navigate a Donald Trump presidency. The news isn’t a flurry but a blizzard – there is simply so much about that it’s hard to know what to focus on.
From policy barrages, to viral videos, provocative tweets and press conference sparring, mixed in with outrageous pronouncements off the cuff, it’s easy to be boggled as to which bits of it really matter.
The sight of the new President dancing with the Village People – a scene that would previously have raised concerns of some kind of hallucinatory fever – is just one example.
So what should we pay attention to? Most obvious are the hazards. The promise of hefty trade tariffs threatens economic damage inside the United States and around the world.
The new President’s past praise for Vladimir Putin and equivocal – at best – approach to the right of a free nation to defend itself raises severe and justified worries for Ukraine’s future.
His sympathies with 6 January insurrectionists should trouble all of us who want a stable and democratic America underpinning the free world’s security.
Even the most positive thing many can say about him – that he is a walking deterrent to troublemakers on the international stage – rests on the perception of the most powerful man in the world as a “mad dog”, so unpredictable that you don’t want to mess with him. That has the obvious downside that a mad dog is normally not a very nice thing to have around the place.
There are some other things which we can tease out from the endless Maga broadsides, nonetheless. Most notable in Trump’s early tranche of executive orders is his focus on energy – its production, security and price.
Indeed, he has said he intends to declare a “national energy emergency” – a step which will unlock additional powers for the White House. We know he intends to authorise extraction in Alaska, which was previously blocked, and other steps seem likely in due course too.
The incoming administration has long signalled that it views energy as a lynchpin of its political project, because it sees it as a lynchpin of the economy.
As a candidate he even promised to halve prices in the first 18 months, a tall order by anyone’s measure. Whether he manages it remains to be seen, but it’s hard to argue with the importance of energy as an economic lever.
It seems remarkable, even after a painful domestic bills crisis, that in the UK we still seem to under-rate the importance of energy costs in the economy. Literally everything becomes more difficult to do when costs are high – from running a household, to building and maintaining infrastructure, to growing a business.
We know this from personal experience. We know it intuitively. And if that wasn’t enough, we know it from looking at what is happening all around us: why do people think the British steel industry vanished, just as policymakers intentionally increased the fundamental underlying cost in making and working steel?
Meanwhile, the UK chemicals industry has declined by 38 per cent since 2021 because their work has been made impossible by energy prices. Early this month, Ineos shut down the last remaining ethanol plant in the country reportedly because its energy costs had doubled “in the last five years and are now five times higher than in the US”.
Perhaps that sounds a bit basic and metal-bashing for your tastes, and you think we’d be better off doing innovative, complex industry instead. If so, bear in mind that ethanol is vital to the manufacture of many pharmaceuticals, a sector in which we should be able to lead the world.
These are not accidents, or sad consequences of inevitable global change – they are deliberate choices, made in Westminster, which we are inflicting upon ourselves. As the Royal Bank of Canada noted last week: “The UK is a country with the reserves in the North Sea to be self-sufficient in gas for many years…Yet oil companies are being stymied in developing new fields… such obstruction means that the UK is forced to import LNG from far afield – only adding to …emissions in the process. Meanwhile… jobs and investment are lost to the UK”.
Slow clap all round.
Notably, Trump is also reported to be planning a liberalisation of American LNG (liquified natural gas) exports – bringing money in to the US economy from customers who, like us, are increasingly clamouring to import energy.
It’s better to buy from America than continuing to subsidise Russia’s mass-murdering war machine, as Europe still does by buying billions in oil and gas from Putin each year. More secure, too, than relying on tyrants in other parts of the world who might at any time pull the plug or be overthrown.
But it would be far preferable both financially and in security terms to be producing more of our own energy. It is the height of foolishness to be buying in, at elevated prices and emissions, what we could produce ourselves at a profit. Gas, offshore and onshore wind, nuclear (ideally all of the above)… we are well-placed to boost our economy and improve our security with an effective energy policy.
While this story is frustrating, its source provides a reason for optimism: in an age when so many problems feel beyond our control, this is one where the only obstacle is our own poor choices. So let’s change them.
Mark Wallace is chief executive of Total Politics Group