By Vijay Jayaraj

For too long, the conversation around energy policy in the United States has been dominated by a toxic brew of partisan rancor, media sensationalism, and international grandstanding. The far-left media are now driving a narrative that President Trump’s positions are an assault on reason itself. But the opposite is the truth.

What we’re witnessing isn’t a denial of science or a retreat from reality. It’s a bold, pragmatic recalibration – one rooted in economic foresight, scientific clarity, and a refusal to let America’s industrial supremacy be eroded by bureaucratic bloat and globalist agendas.

Back to Energy Dominance

Energy costs ripple through every corner of the economy. When electricity prices spike or fuel becomes scarce, manufacturers scale back, small businesses shutter, and families get pinched. For decades, the U.S. has enjoyed an enviable position as an energy superpower, thanks to fossil fuels and other natural resources, technological ingenuity, and relatively free markets.

Yet in recent years, that advantage has been jeopardized by a tangle of climate regulations, green subsidies, and international climate commitments that often prioritize political optics over practical outcomes.

Take the Paris Agreement, for example, from which Trump intends to withdraw a second time after Biden reversed a withdrawal during Trump’s first term. The agreement is billed as a scientific pact, but it’s a political one – riddled with loopholes for China and India, the world’s biggest CO2 emitters, while saddling the U.S. with disproportionate costs. The United Nations, which oversees it, has a long history of blending science with ideology. Its climate summits are as much about posturing as progress, with jet-setting delegates of powerful countries demanding sacrifices they won’t make themselves.

The Biden years featured a concerted push for “green” technologies – wind, solar, battery storage – coupled with a chokehold on oil and gas development. Agencies like the Department of Energy funneled billions into projects destined for failure, repeating on a larger scale the Solyndra debacle of the Obama administration. Meanwhile, the agency dragged its feet on permits for pipelines and terminals for liquefied natural gas exports.

Trump’s policy shift – emphasizing fossil fuel production, streamlining permitting, and pulling back from the dogmatic green agenda – offers a chance to pursue what works. This is a demonstration of rationality and a rejection of corruption and groupthink that has masqueraded as scientific consensus.

By unleashing domestic oil and gas production in places like the Permian Basin, Alaska, and offshore, Trump is betting on oil deposits that can supply the country for decades and natural gas reserves that can power the world. This isn’t nostalgia for a bygone era but a recognition that fossil fuels remain the most reliable, scalable, and cost-effective energy sources available today.

Far-Left Embraces Pseudoscience

The left accuses Trump of ignoring settled science. But what’s settled? Certainly not the doomsday script that demands abandonment of proven technologies in exchange for so-called renewable fads that make platform shoes look practical.

For years, the climate debate has been less about data and more about dogma. Almost all future forecasts on climate by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are based upon scientifically inaccurate assumptions about the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gases.

Even if the U.N.’s moderate emissions scenarios come to pass, global temperatures are predicted to rise only 2-3 degrees Celsius by 2100 – hardly an apocalyptic outcome and very likely a beneficial one.

Trump’s pledge to slash red tape is a war on waste. He’s betting that American industry, unshackled, can deliver cleaner, cheaper energy faster than any government mandate ever could.

Until recently dictated by fear, guilt, and globalist platitudes, energy policy is now on track to reflect reality and respond to the economic imperative for affordable power and the strategic need to stay ahead of the curve in a competitive and dangerous world.

This commentary was first published at BizPac Review on March 12, 2025.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO₂ Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.