(RealClearEnergy)—Change is much needed, especially since Joe Biden has overturned three-quarters of Trump’s deregulatory actions that prioritized American energy independence and natural resources. Biden walked back President Trump’s sanctioning of the Keystone XL Pipeline, imposed burdensome regulations on the emissions of naturally occurring gases like methane, and circumvented the legislative process by mandating federal agencies to create wide-sweeping proposals on obtaining carbon neutrality.
Additionally, the Biden administration’s disastrous misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” has raised energy prices, skyrocketed inflation, and has failed to provide the clean energy advancement it promised.
With Congress now on his side, President Trump can spearhead the adoption of much-needed energy reforms that have been blocked or overturned and can encourage policies that reduce costs, cultivate energy independence and stability, and put America’s interests and wellbeing first.
In his first term, President Trump made great strides with environmental and energy sector deregulation, such as suspending participation in the Paris Climate Agreement, replacing the Clean Power Plan with the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, and lifting natural gas and oil extraction bans. But because the majority of these reforms were temporary fixes in the form of executive orders, it is crucial that President Trump’s second term policies create sustainable, long-term change that is written into law by Congress.
As a whole, President Trump’s energy and environmental philosophy must remain anchored in free enterprise, economic stability, and independence from foreign adversaries. There are several steps he can take and encourage Congress to adopt to revive the stability and excellence of American energy.
First, he should focus on eliminating harmful subsidies that distort energy markets and effectively nearly double the capital cost of electric generation. Wind energy subsidies are one example of these extraneous expenses that are made in the name of climate justice. Instead, they disincentivize innovation, reduce competition, and raise prices for consumers.
Second, the new administration should take a deregulatory scalpel to the countless unnecessary environmental and energy regulations that choke out competition, discourage energy development, and are not otherwise justified, such as regulations on emissions from naturally occurring gases like methane.
Next, President Trump should encourage Congress to unleash our natural resources for greater innovation and economic growth. This can be done by discouraging restrictions on natural gas usage for appliances, promoting exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), facilitating construction of new pipelines and use of existing ones, and streamlining the leasing of federal lands for oil and gas development, such as Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The latter is especially important in light of Biden’s recent action to prevent drilling on over 625 million acres of offshore lands, something President Trump should take every action to reverse.
To accomplish these objectives, the permitting process for energy projects must be reformed and streamlined to remove unjustified permits and solve the inefficiencies and years-long processing delays that stifle energy development and growth. Processing energy project permits in a timely and efficient manner will grow American jobs, fast-track energy independence, and ignite innovation of cleaner, alternative sources of energy such as nuclear generation.
In the end, America’s domestic energy policies can only do so much for the environment and lessening the effects of any anthropomorphic climate change, since America contributes only a small fraction of overall so-called “greenhouse gases.” Moreover, human activity is not the sole determiner of climate changes, and much change is caused by environmental phenomena outside human control – such as sunspots, volcanic activity, variations in Earth’s orbit, and changing CO2 levels. It is crucial that the incoming administration have a clear, well-rounded energy agenda that stabilizes the economy and slashes burdensome, politically correct regulations while still exploring cleaner and more efficient sources of sustainable energy. The two are not mutually exclusive. Now is the perfect time for the incoming administration to prioritize their fusion.
Ultimately, the new energy and environmental policy platform must protect taxpayers from gratuitous spending in the name of “clean energy” — the Inflation Reduction Act’s $1 trillion fiscal cost being a prime example. It must include them in important climate and energy policy discussions and proposals, and it must prevent the energy shortages and inflation that are inevitable under today’s progressive regulations and caps.
Environmental and energy agency employees must be transparent with and accountable to the American people about the costs of policies and regulations made in the name of preventing global warming. Sweeping climate and energy policy discussions should occur in the public sphere, not behind the closed doors of the EPA and the DOE.
America’s energy and environmental policies are no longer simply a debate over whether anthropomorphic climate change exists and whether fossil fuels are responsible for global warming – it has evolved into an economic and national security issue that affects every American. The country needs energy independence to not only succeed, but to survive. Threats of foreign aggression loom on every front. Depending on our adversaries for critical energy supplies is reckless and irresponsible.
Thankfully, conservatives finally have another chance to restore reliability, abundance, and affordability in the energy sector by unleashing our natural resources and removing anti-growth regulations.
At long last, the new administration can combat the Biden-Harris progressive climate agenda that did nothing but waste American energy potential and burden hardworking Americans, all in the name of “saving the planet.” Such virtue-signaling policies are neither economically nor scientifically sound, and the next four years provide the perfect opportunity to overturn them and unleash the economic growth, innovation, and energy stability that America’s abundant natural resources make possible.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
