Just eight months into his second presidency, a strong case can be made that President Donald Trump must now be considered the most consequential energy president in U.S. history. A convergence of major recent international events helps prove the case.
New Lloyd’s of London CEO Patrick Tiernan moved this week to scrap the net-zero policies invoked by his predecessor, an obvious concession to the sea change in energy and climate policy direction underway in the second presidency of Trump.
Lloyd’s previous CEO, John Neal, put in place policies requiring that participants in the Lloyd’s insurance market quit insuring energy projects that don’t conform to the net-zero goals laid out by the 2016 Paris Climate Accords by the year 2030. Neal further pledged to transform the entire Lloyd’s insurance market into a pure net-zero business model by 2050.
“It is important that Lloyd’s remains apolitical,” Tiernan said of the company’s change in direction. “The 2050 targets are government targets. We operate in multiple jurisdictions under different governments with different targets. We have to operate under the policies and the laws of where we operate.”
Obviously, the policies and laws in the United States, the market in which so many Lloyd’s insurers maintain major interests, have undergone a seismic shift since Mr. Trump took office in January, a shift that seems destined to continue for at least the next 40 months, and possibly for years longer. Trump’s policy turnabout has had major impacts on the U.S. energy picture starting almost from his first day in office, and now the impacts are being felt internationally.
This move by Lloyd’s is far from the only recent signal that major changes are underway. Another bit of proof came from British major oil company Shell, which announced on Wednesday it will abandon its planned biofuels project in Rotterdam after a commercial and technical evaluation deemed it no longer competitive in a rapidly shifting marketplace. The facility was already under construction and would have become the largest biofuels plant on earth if completed.
Shell and its fellow UK-based major, BP, have both responded to the shifting direction of the net-zero globalist ambition by dramatically scaling back their renewables investments and reallocating capital back to their core oil and gas businesses in an effort to become more competitive with U.S. majors ExxonMobil and Chevron. It’s a race in which BP especially has fallen far behind and is now struggling to regain lost ground.
The Trump revolution has also had a big impact on wind developers that are majority owned by other governments, like Denmark’s Orsted and Norway’s Equinor. Equinor was forced in July to take a write down of almost $1 billion related to its U.S. offshore wind ventures in the face of the Trump administration’s multi-pronged assault on that sector, one of former President Joe Biden’s biggest energy-related ambitions.
Orsted, meanwhile, having failed to attract investors to assume big pieces of its own U.S. offshore projects, is now pursuing a $9.4 billion rights issue that constitutes roughly 70% of the company’s full current market value. Orsted’s U.S. struggles also complicate Equinor’s business planning since the Norwegian company owns 10% of its Danish competitor. Fortunately for Orsted, Equinor recently pledged to plow another $1 billion into the rights issue to maintain its ownership percentage; otherwise, Equinor would have seen its position significantly diluted.
Trump’s policy turnabout is also having major impacts on the international banking sector. In late August, the UN-backed Net Zero Banking Alliance announced it was pausing operations amid a flood of high profile members rushing to abandon the cause, leading to speculation that it will soon collapse entirely.
It wasn’t hard to see all these dramatic changes and many others coming once it became obvious the United States was changing its policy direction. America’s out-sized economy and consumer market have always given it out-sized influence on global events. That influence only becomes magnified when the Oval Office is held by a President with Donald Trump’s keen understanding of the power of leverage and the willingness to deploy it.
It all adds up to make President Trump without any question at all the most consequential energy policy president in U.S. history, both at home and abroad.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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