Monopoly man: How Trump manipulates America’s energy markets 

The U.S. has been blessed with presidents who intervened when corporations gained too much power. Interventions are sometimes necessary when corporate interests conflict with the public interest. It happens because a corporation’s primary mission is to keep shareholders happy, not the public.  

Unfortunately, corporate consolidations and profiteering can jeopardize public health and welfare. Several presidents have taken steps to break up monopolies, end unfair trade practices and prevent price fixing, among other problems. Theodore Roosevelt earned the title of “trustbuster.” President William Howard Taft utilized the Sherman Antitrust Act to break up the Standard Oil Company and the American Tobacco Company. President Ronald Reagan helped break up AT&T. President Dwight Eisenhower warned us to be vigilant about the military-industrial complex.

More recently, Joe Biden ordered federal agencies to crack down on anti-competitive corporate practices. Agencies complied by filing antitrust lawsuits against tech companies, including Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta. 

President Trump is cut from a very different cloth. He’s doing everything in his power to create a near-monopoly rather than busting one. He is helping the fossil-fuel industry dominate America’s energy mix today and far into the future.

Last year, Trump promised to give the industry a windfall if it contributed enough money to his presidential campaign. It delivered, so Trump is delivering, too. He is relaxing pollution limits, opening new public lands to exploration, giving the industry a $6 billion discount for drilling on those lands, and using tariffs to pressure other countries to buy U.S. oil and gas.

His so-called “big beautiful bill" provides the industry with an additional $18 billion in tax breaks, on top of the more than $20 billion it already receives annually.

Trump’s most market-distorting favor for Big Oil is his suppression of competition from clean energy, particularly solar and wind power. The three-year-old Inflation Reduction Act created the nation’s biggest-ever investment in renewable energy; his big bill prematurely ends those investments, in some cases by terminating projects already underway.  

The Rhodium Group, an independent research organization, notes that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act “puts more than half a trillion dollars of clean energy and transportation investment at risk of cancellation,” including $110 billion in clean-energy manufacturing plants that have not yet come online. 

Republicans traditionally argue that markets, not government, should pick winners. The winners today should be electricity generated by sunlight and wind. Lazard Inc., a financial services company, issues annual reports on the “levelized” cost of electricity — in other words, what a utility must charge for electricity to build and operate a power plant. Lazard’s latest analysis, issued in June, indicates that utility-scale wind and solar power have been the lowest-cost way to generate electricity for the past decade, even without government subsidies. 

The cost of storing intermittent renewable energy is also declining sharply, Lazard says, while the cost of building a new combined-cycle gas-fired power plant has reached a 10-year high. To those who complain that sunlight and wind are intermittent, clean energy advocates point out that renewable energy is more reliable than fossil fuels “because it will always be there and its electricity (can be) generated locally.” It will always be cheaper, too, because sunlight and wind are free and don’t require expensive pollution mitigation like carbon capture. 

Wind and solar power share another important advantage: They are the quickest ways to add generating capacity to the U.S. electric system as it struggles to meet the rapidly growing demand not only of data centers but also of electric vehicles and cooling systems as buildings adapt to heatwaves.

Last February, before Trump’s monopolizing took hold, the U.S. Energy Information Administration expected that 93 percent of the electric-generating capacity added in the U.S. this year would be from wind and solar systems with battery storage. However, the "big beautiful bill” changes America’s energy landscape by tilting markets heavily in favor of fossil fuels. 

The Rhodium Group calculates that U.S. Industry will spend as much as $11 billion more per year on energy in 2035 due to the bill, costs that are likely to be passed on to consumers. Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions are expected to be as much as 44 percent higher than under Biden’s policies. 

Now, The New York Times reports that “Federal agencies have recently issued a barrage of restrictions that could halt construction of solar and wind farms on public and private lands.” Because fossil fuel combustion is primarily responsible for climate change, Trump has banished climate science and disaster reports from the federal government. 

The Interior Department is gathering information on bird deaths due to turbines, apparently preparing to clip wind power’s wings. It’s paying special attention to eagles. An objective study would point out that fossil fuels kill eagles with toxic pollution, infrastructure collisions, habitat loss and climate change. Past studies estimate that fossil fuels are responsible for 26 to 38 times more bird deaths than solar and wind farms, not counting climate impacts. 

Fossil fuels kill people, too. Their pollution and climate impacts cause an estimated 350,000 premature deaths in the U.S. each year and more than 8 million worldwide. Some scientists believe that the federal government should declare climate change a public health emergency. 

Before Trump’s interference in energy markets, clean energy was on a roll. In April, renewable energy provided more electricity than fossil fuels for the first time in U.S. history. However, fossil fuels still provide more than 80 percent of the nation’s total energy consumption.  

America’s anti-trust laws are designed to promote and maintain fair competition in the marketplace. They are meant to prevent anti-competitive practices that can harm consumers and stifle innovation. Trump has a different objective. His policies send the message that fossil fuels can no longer compete in the economy without the president of the United States rigging energy markets. 

William S. Becker is a former U.S. Department of Energy central regional director who administered energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies programs. He also served as special assistant to the department’s assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy. Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.