Back in May 2016, when he was still an unlikely contestant in that year’s presidential race, Donald Trump declared so-called energy dominance a strategic policy goal for the United States. A few months later, three leading Trump officials, including former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, defined the concept as “a self-reliant and secure nation, free from the geopolitical turmoil of other nations that seek to use energy as an economic weapon.”
Once in the White House, Trump started an aggressive deregulation campaign to eliminate the rules that had stifled domestic production, opening up more federal land and offshore areas to drilling, while removing environmental regulations. In December 2017, a few months after he announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, the president made clear through his National Security Strategy document that energy dominance would not be reconcilable with the fight against global warming, and that the United States would focus instead on countering “an anti-growth energy agenda that is detrimental to US economic and energy security interests.”
