From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

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.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Bonner Cohen

“We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar,” said President Trump in an Aug. 20 post on Truth Social.  “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!”

Trump’s remarks came six weeks after enactment of his One Big Beautiful Bill terminated tax credits for wind and solar projects by the end of 2027.

The Trump administration has also issued a stop-work order for the Revolution Wind project, an industrial-scale offshore wind project 12 miles off the Rhode Island coast that was 80 percent completed.  This was followed by an Aug. 29 announcement by the Department of Transportation that it was cutting around $679 million in federal funding for 12 offshore wind farms in 11 states, calling the projects “wasteful.”

Sending an unmistakable message to investors to avoid risking their capital on no-longer-fashionable green energy, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) is pulling the plug on a slew of funding programs for wind and solar power.

“Our prime farmland should not be wasted and replaced with green new deal subsidized solar panels,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on a visit to Tennessee in late August.  “We are no longer allowing businesses to use your taxpayer dollars to fund solar projects on prime American farmland, and we will no longer allow solar panels manufactured by foreign adversaries to be used in our USDA-funded projects.”

The White House is putting the squeeze on an industry that can ill-afford to lose the privileges it has enjoyed for so many years. Acknowledging the hesitancy of investors to fund green-energy projects with the looming phaseout of federal subsidies, James Holmes, CEO of Solx, a solar module manufacturer, told The Washington Post, “We’re seeing some paralysis in decision-making in the developer world right now.”  He added, “There’s been a pretty significant hit to our industry, but we’ll get through it.”

That may not be easy.  According to SolarInsure, a firm that tracks the commercial performance of the domestic solar industry, over 100 solar companies declared bankruptcy or shut down in 2024—a year before the second Trump administration started turning the screws on the industry.

As wind and solar companies confront an increasingly unfavorable commercial and political climate, green energy is also taking a hit from its global financial support network.

The United Nations-backed Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) “has suspended activities, following the departure of numerous financial institutions from its ranks amid political pressure from the Trump administration,” The Wall Street Journal reported.  Established in 2021, the NZBA’s 120 banks in 40 countries were a formidable element in global decarbonization schemes, which included support for wind and solar power.  Among the U.S. banks that headed for the exits in the aftermath of Trump’s election were JP Morgan, Citi, and Morgan Stanley.  They have been joined more recently by European heavyweights HSBC, Barclays, and UBS.

Wind and solar power require a lot of upfront capital, and investors may be having second thoughts about placing their bets on what looks like a losing horse.

“Wind and solar energy are dilute, intermittent, fragile, surface-intensive, transmission-extensive, and government-dependent,” notes Robert Bradley, founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research.

Given these inherent disadvantages of wind and solar power, it’s no surprise that the Department of Agriculture is throttling the flow of taxpayer money to solar projects.  The USDA’s mission is to “provide leadership on food, agriculture, food, natural resources, rural development, nutrition, and related issues….” It is not to help prop up an industry whose best days are behind it.

Effective immediately, wind and solar projects will no longer be eligible for USDA Rural Development Business and Industry (B&I) Guaranteed Loan Program. A second USDA energy-related guaranteed loan program, known by the acronym REAP, will henceforth require that wind and solar installations on farms and ranches be “right-sized for their facilities.”

If project applications include ground-mounted solar photovoltaic systems larger than 50 kilowatts or such systems that “cannot document historical energy usage,” they will not be eligible for REAP.

Ending Misallocation Of Resources

“For too long, Washington bureaucrats and foreign adversaries have tried to dictate how we use our land and our resources,” said Republican Rep. Harriot Hagermann of Wyoming.  “Taxpayers should never be forced to bankroll green new deal scams that destroy our farmland and undermine our food security.”

Hagermann’s citing of “foreign adversaries” is a clear reference to China, which is by far the world’s leading manufacturer of solar panels, according to the International Energy Agency.

According to a USDA study from 2024, 424,000 acres of rural land were home to wind turbines and solar arrays in 2020.  While this – outdated – figure represents less than 0.05 percent of the nearly 900 million acres of farmland in the U.S., the prospect of ever-increasing amounts of farmland being taken out of full-time food production to support part-time energy was enough to persuade USDA that a change of course was in order.

Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).