President Trump’s executive actions on energy have set the stage for a “major reset” of domestic production that will fuel an economic boom to overtake China — while “stabilizing” global conflicts that erupted in the last administration, according to newly elected Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.Va.).
The popular two-term governor of West Virginia, who ran as a Democrat but joined the Republican Party after winning election to his first term in 2016, told The Post in an interview this week that Trump’s reversals of Biden-era policies will make the US “the energy power of the world.”
“Energy is everything — it fixes inflation, it absolutely secures us from a defense standpoint,” Justice said. “The only way that that civilization has ever progressed is cheap and abundant energy.”
Trump’s executive orders included unleashing American energy and declaring a national energy emergency to expedite the domestic production of “oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources.”
In particular, the Mountain State senator identified the boost given to rare earth minerals as key to creating more jobs, strengthening US supply chains and cutting into China’s share of the global energy market.
Justice anticipates codifying, either via Republicans’ massive border, tax and energy bill or independent legislation, more permitting options for West Virginia producers.
The son of a coal magnate, Justice was recently ranked as the second-most-popular US governor and said he “embraced” alternative energy sources alongside more traditional sources, fueling the Mountain State’s rise to becoming one of the largest producers of coal and gas.
But the production suffered setbacks, he claimed, after former President Joe Biden had pressed forward with plans to move the US to 100% electrical grid by 2035 — and net-zero carbon emissions nationwide by 2050.
“This is a Texas Hold ‘Em game where all of a sudden the Biden administration just shoved everything out there and said, ‘We’re all in,’” Justice characterized the effort, blaming the move for providing extra cash for Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine and accelerating the risk of future electrical grid blackouts.
He added that he was recently given a stark warning as well by a Senate Republican colleague about the costs of such regulatory actions.
“We try to work really hard here — like crazy — to be able to spend $2.5 trillion dollars more than we take in,” the unnamed GOP senator joked to Justice.
Lawmakers and others have criticized Biden’s signature legislation codifying the green proposals, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, for not sufficiently reshoring supply chains, effectively giving handouts to US adversaries like China and Russia as well as bilking US taxpayers for more than $1 trillion.
Former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm admitted as much in a New York Times op-ed on Thursday.
“Other governments are waiting with bated breath for us to pare back our grants, loans and tax credits so they can use the same tools to sweet-talk the next generation of factories to their shores,” she wrote.
Former Democrat-turned-independent Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) had previously called the Biden administration out for the oversight, even as he cast decisive votes to move the measure through Congress.
“American tax dollars should not be used to support manufacturing jobs overseas,” he said in March 2023. “It is a pathetic excuse to spend more taxpayer dollars as quickly as possible and further cedes control to the Chinese Communist Party in the process.”
He’d already earned the ire of Biden by opposing the much larger Build Back Better Act, provisions of which were later tucked into the climate law, as well as the actress Bette Midler, who excoriated the senator’s whole state of West Virginia as being populated by the “poor, illiterate and strung out.”
Justice — who memorably told the “Beaches” star to kiss his English bulldog’s “heine” in response — revealed he never received a personal apology from Midler after, but added that Manchin caving to Biden was a blow to constituencies in his state.
“A trillion-plus dollars that are just going out in every direction known to man,” he went on. “And then you get people like Sen. Manchin leading the charge.”
There were also large investments for solar plants, wind farms and electric vehicle infrastructure that either petered out or didn’t help to lower prices, as well as suggestions to ban the use of gas-powered applicances like stoves.
“This is not a matter of not embracing renewable energy, it’s a matter of embracing only renewable energy, while our conventional energy producers are shut out and cast as the root of the problem,” Justice said.
“As West Virginia governor, I supported this, but I also understood green energy as it stands right now is a piece of the puzzle, not the entire thing.”
The result was a “stifling” of the US economy based on climate concerns that solely benefitted China, according to the freshman senator, despite the US previously producing coal and other energy in a “cleaner” manner.
Treasury Secretary designee Scott Bessent agreed with the assessment in a recent confirmation hearing, telling members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee bluntly: “There is not a clean energy race. There is an energy race.”
“China will build 100 new coal plants this year,” he explained last week in the hearing. “China will build 10 nuclear plants this year — that is not solar.”
While the US has outpaced all other nations in terms of oil production since 2018, it’s was overtaken in overall energy production by China in 2006, according to data compiled by the Energy Information Administration.
That’s continued in the almost two decades since then, with Russia and Saudi Arabia close behind American energy production levels.
China’s solar production was also double the US rate as of 2022, per EIA statistics.
