President-elect Donald Trump already has a plan to boost U.S. energy production. Within hours of his victory, Trump made clear that one of his first orders of business was to “get back to drilling.”
Increasing oil and natural gas production is absolutely the right place to start, but Trump needs to think far more expansively. People are counting on him to unleash energy in far more groundbreaking ways — ways that can fundamentally transform daily life for the better.
Energy is essential to addressing the challenges that motivated people to vote for Trump in such historic numbers. Exit polls show that people are furious about the lackluster economy, and if you look a little deeper, Americans are especially upset about the inflation of the past four years. They want their costs to go down, not just on their utility bills but on everything from groceries to housing.
The only way to turn this around is to open the floodgates of American energy. History proves that economic progress — i.e., bigger wages, better jobs, and bolder innovations — only come when energy production increases. Whether it’s gasoline or electricity, energy fuels the growth that improves people’s lives.
Yet in recent decades, federal regulations have made it harder to produce more energy, and energy consumption is now lower today than it was in 2000. No wonder people are fed up with the economy: We’ve stagnated instead of sprinting toward a much better future.
This is where Trump can and must act. By all means, he should shred the overregulation that stifles oil and gas production. Those are critical energy sources that fuel the cars we drive, help heat our homes, and enable the production and transportation of groceries and every other good we buy. If he can supercharge oil and gas drilling, people will quickly benefit from lower prices.
But we have to think much bigger than fossil fuels. The most exciting energy technologies today are in areas such as geothermal, an unlimited energy source drawn from the Earth’s natural heat, and nuclear power, which is the cleanest and most potent energy source humanity has discovered.
Yet government invariably stands in the way. Federal permitting makes new nuclear and geothermal projects either unaffordable to start or virtually impossible to complete. Even when permitting isn’t a problem, bureaucrats routinely block commonsense proposals to expand these industries.
Case in point: Hours before Election Day, the federal government rejected a request to connect Amazon data centers to a Pennsylvania nuclear plant. Where else are energy-hungry companies supposed to find the power they need, which they use to fuel the innovation that makes goods cheaper and life better?
Breaking these barriers should be a domestic priority for Trump. Nuclear power alone could dramatically expand America’s energy production if only the government would get out of the way. Companies are ready and willing to build more nuclear plants based on the newest and safest technology if Washington would let them. And a new generation of innovators is creating small modular nuclear reactors that are far more affordable and efficient and can even be moved to wherever they’re needed.
Energy advances such as these will deliver untold improvements in people’s quality of life. With far more energy, we could dramatically lower the cost of farming, which is energy-intensive. We could also lower the cost of transporting food to stores, which requires plenty of energy, too. Both things would cause the price of groceries to fall, possibly dramatically.
The cost of housing would also fall because energy is baked into the cost of every construction material. More readily available energy would even make it easier to implement faster and more affordable construction techniques — think the three-dimensional printing of homes, which has enormous electricity needs.
And of course, unleashing energy will unleash wage growth. Businesses will be able to save enormous costs, which they can then give back to workers in their paychecks. Even more importantly, job creators could invest in new technologies that lead to greater productivity, especially in the realm of artificial intelligence.
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People voted for Trump because they’re fed up with years of regulation-induced stagnation and looming national decline. They’re looking for the next president, and leaders at every level, to unleash a future of abundance for all.
By all means, Trump should expand oil and gas drilling on day one. But on day two and every day after, he should expand the advanced energy that can bring our country into an unimaginably better future.
Taylor Barkley is the director of public policy for the Abundance Institute.