Opinion | Trump’s Energy Policy is Full of Contradictions — on Purpose

The first few days of President Trump’s second administration delivered a fusillade of executive orders about energy and climate policy. At first, what stands out is their many contradictions.

In one order, Mr. Trump says that he wants the United States to become the world’s top producer of lithium, rare earth elements and other minerals that are used in batteries, high-end magnets and some cutting-edge defense tools. Yet elsewhere, he moves to cut off American demand for electric vehicles and wind turbines — even though these industries would buy the rocks coming out of American mines.

In another order, Mr. Trump declares that the country faces an imminent energy emergency because its “inadequate and intermittent energy supply” cannot meet its growing needs. He says therefore the United States must discard a slew of environmental and permitting laws in order to build more pipelines, refineries and power plants. But he does not get rid of any obstacles to building more solar and wind power generation or battery storage — even though these energy sources are expanding faster in this country and around the world than any others because the economics are so good.

These actions, taken together, do not make sense on their own terms. And what becomes clear from looking at Mr. Trump’s energy agenda as a whole is that it’s not supposed to — it is not actually intended to shore up the country’s energy supply. It is also not meant to engineer a boom in new oil and gas supply, something that Mr. Trump’s donors don’t seem to want.

The guiding logic of the policies, instead, is to make the market for fossil fuels as big as possible. Mr. Trump wants to lock in oil and gas demand for the long term. That is why he has weakened energy efficiency rules for household appliances. That is why he has thrown out the government’s fuel economy rules for cars and trucks.

It’s also why, even as Mr. Trump asserted that the United States doesn’t have enough energy, he cleared the way for it to export more natural gas. America is already on track to double its liquefied natural gas exports by 2028, but Mr. Trump’s emergency declaration will pave the way for officials to approve about a half-dozen additional L.N.G. export terminals now sitting on the docket. Today, America generates more electricity with natural gas than any other fuel. By building more export terminals, and sending even more gas abroad, Mr. Trump will risk tying domestic power prices to the global gas market, potentially driving up costs for American consumers.

Now, it’s true that natural gas exports can help America’s allies, much as they did after Russia invaded Ukraine, as Mr. Trump nods to in his executive order. I can envision situations in which exporting natural gas could be quite important to global security. But Mr. Trump cannot seriously claim to be helping Europe while he makes a play to annex Greenland. And few of the other arguments for his peculiar mix of policies hold up, either. In sum, Mr. Trump is saying that America needs more energy and that it should stop building certain kinds of power plants and that it should increase its energy exports.

There is a broader story here, though. China, with its relatively scarce oil and gas resources, is investing in a future where most energy will come from manufactured products such as solar panels. China is the world’s top carbon polluter, and its power grid churns through climate-destroying coal. But over the past decade, it has used regulations and incentives to develop a world-class electric vehicle industry, not to mention a solar and wind equipment manufacturing colossus. Now it is happily exporting these clean energy products.

The United States has not managed its energy markets as strategically. Over the past decade, it has bounced from one energy ideal to another as Mr. Trump has come in and out of office. American leadership in the 20th century was grounded partly in the country’s mammoth fossil fuel reserves. But in this century, the political elite has struggled with how to handle these still considerable resources: Washington has forced consumers to cling to oil, allowed its car companies to build giant, inefficient S.U.V.s and allowed key energy innovations such as the lithium-ion battery to slip away.

Now the Trump administration is trying to keep the party going for oil and gas companies. Instead of focusing on the parts of the economy where oil and gas might be most useful and saving the rest for export, he is bent on expanding fossil fuel demand, everywhere, at any cost. And he may be willing to cut funding for — even deny permits to — any energy technology that irritates him or stands in his way.

Mr. Trump’s administration, or at least his energy policy, is revealing itself as a set of closely managed tensions within his coalition and even, sometimes, within his own psyche. The largest of these is the tension between Mr. Trump’s instinctive hunger for big tariffs and his political need to control inflation. Another is the tension between his hatred for trade and his need to keep the auto-making and oil industries — which depend on the free exchange of car parts and crude oil with Canada and Mexico — afloat.

Still another is between his political loyalty to the fossil fuel industry and his need to find new energy sources to power artificial intelligence. Even his personal enmity for wind power must be weighed against the degree to which Texas, Oklahoma and other Plains States depend on electricity from wind turbines.

The skillful juggling of these tensions — like the continued existence of the oil and gas industry itself, at least in its current state — cannot go on forever. But it can go on for a little while longer. And when the act finally stops, when the dancing baubles crash to the floor, Americans will wake up and find themselves in a world transformed.