By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion
If one day you surveyed your kitchen cabinets and determined that you were running dangerously low on potato chips and therefore declared a potato chip emergency to your family, they’d look at you pretty funny if your next order was for them to eat every remaining potato chip as quickly as possible.
That’s not how emergencies work!
But this is President Trump’s approach to the “energy emergency” he declared on his first day back in office. While bemoaning “inadequate energy supply and infrastructure” leading to “high energy prices that devastate Americans,” he’s also doing everything in his power to make sure those same Americans burn more energy, and faster.
The latest baffling example is his Environmental Protection Agency’s reported plan to end its Energy Star program, which certifies the energy efficiency of appliances, electronics, HVAC systems, new homes and more. In its 33-year history, Energy Star has saved more than $500 billion in energy costs and prevented 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the EPA. Launched by the administration of former oil executive George H.W. Bush, it’s a rare program with bipartisan support that helps the climate and consumers at the same time.
“If you wanted to raise families’ energy bills, getting rid of the Energy Star label would be a pretty good way,” Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a nonprofit group, said in a statement. “This would take away basic information from consumers who want to choose cost-saving products easily.”
True to its mission, the Energy Star program is also financially efficient, saving consumers $350 for every $1 it spends, according to the Alliance to Save Energy, a nonprofit group whose honorary board includes Republican and Democratic U.S. senators. With a $32 million budget, or less than 1 percent of the EPA’s total, Energy Star saves those devastated Americans more than $40 billion a year on energy bills, or $450 per household. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency has nothing on this actual efficiency department.
A wide swath of industries from manufacturing to construction have designed their operations to meet Energy Star requirements. It’s a powerful selling point for consumers, and having standards maintained by neutral experts at a body like the EPA makes life easier for businesses. More than 1,000 companies, local governments and other groups signed a letter last month pleading with EPA chief Lee Zeldin to preserve the program, calling it “among the most successful public-private partnerships in U.S. history.”
Another of Trump’s big priorities is artificial intelligence, with executive orders touting “AI dominance” and pushing AI in classrooms and a declaration that every federal agency must hire more AI experts (even as DOGE fires hundreds of AI experts, for efficiency). AI is, of course, thirsty for electricity, exacerbating the supposed national shortage of electrons. On Tuesday, the giant utility American Electric Power Co. Inc. said new hyperscale data centers helped drive a first-quarter acceleration of load growth unseen since the 1960s.
Energy efficiency makes room for all that extra load. It also eases the accompanying strain on electric grids — that “inadequate infrastructure” Trump claims to be so worried about — making blackouts less likely and, again, lowering energy costs for businesses and consumers.
Strangely, despite the many obvious benefits of energy efficiency, this isn’t Trump’s first attack on it. In February, Energy Secretary Chris Wright delayed higher energy standards for home appliances. And Trump ordered a law-violating rollback of lightbulb efficiency standards that, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Liam Denning noted, had slashed annual lighting demand by 50 terawatt-hours in five years, more than making up for an extra 30 terawatt-hours of load added by data centers during that time.
For context, consider that Energy Star saved 520 terawatt-hours of use in 2020 alone, according to the EPA. That’s a lot of data centers. Again, it’s also a lot of savings for consumers.
It’s pretty obvious by now that Trump’s real goal is probably not alleviating some sort of energy emergency or cutting Americans’ bills. The Occam’s Razor explanation is that he’s simply trying to make us all burn more oil, gas and coal. He promised to carry the fossil fuel industry’s water if it pumped $1 billion into his campaign, and he’s delivering for them, even if it only gave him a fraction of that billion.
There’s also a strong virtue-signaling (or maybe vice-signaling) effect here. Like Texas attacking its own nation-leading renewable energy sector (advanced by another Republican oil man, George W. Bush), rolling back energy efficiency is an act of performative self-harm that might be a temporary boon to fossil fuel companies and will loudly announce your opposition to such woke nonsense as desiring a livable environment. But it will ultimately lead to energy scarcity and higher prices; you know, an emergency.
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal. ©2025 Bloomberg L.P., bloomberg.com/opinion.
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