Trump declares energy emergency, vows to unleash US fossil fuels
Donald Trump says he wants to unleash U.S. oil and gas.
- President Donald Trump has ended some energy efficiency programs and omitted funding to help pay for home energy costs, leaving Americans vulnerable to lack of cooling as summer temperatures increase.
- The low income energy assistance program has helped more than 71,000 households in Arizona pay utility bills since October 2022. The loss of funding could also hurt utilities and grid stability.
- Combined, the actions could create another version of the “national energy emergency” Trump declared at the beginning of his second term.
President Donald Trump’s “national energy emergency” took on new meaning in May — and new victims — according to watchdog and community action organizations who say his policies and changes to the budget threaten both the wallets and lives of Arizonans headed into another scorching summer.
In January, when Trump began his return to office by proclaiming an energy emergency that some experts say doesn’t exist, he called for “unleashing” domestic oil drilling with one pen stroke and blocked permitting for renewable projects with another. That’s despite data showing the U.S. produced and exported more oil and gas during the Biden administration than ever before and statements from the oil industry that they have no plans to increase drilling due to insufficient demand.
The orders also ignored evidence that electricity generation from solar and wind has become the more economical choice in many cases, particularly in sunny Arizona, which ranks ninth among state beneficiaries of Biden’s clean energy incentives.
Trump went on in subsequent months to slash funding for programs that have, most with bipartisan support, helped Americans conserve energy resources and stabilize the electricity grid for decades — moves that could end up creating the energy emergency he declared. The risk to energy prices combined with new cuts to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program that has helped generations of vulnerable households keep their air conditioning units on could, some say, also manifest a summertime public health emergency in Arizona.
Trump’s second-term attacks on energy efficiency gained momentum with an April 9 executive order, in which he continued his long-standing antipathy to low-flow shower heads, toilets and dishwashers that save water and the energy required to purify and transport it. His administration had already delayed the adoption of regular updates to building energy efficiency standards on March 10 and went on to stay a rule designed to move federal buildings toward cleaner energy use on May 5.
Posts from the White House described the April 9 action as “restoring shower freedom” and rolling back “overregulation (that) chokes the American economy.”
But energy efficiency experts and climate scientists argue that each of these federal initiatives had been pursued in an effort to reduce costs of over-electricity production amid rising demand from residents and industry, minimize expensive climate-warming and health impacts that result from burning fossil fuels and protect the freedom to breath clean air that surveys have shown is important to Arizonans.
Meanwhile, White House officials have repeatedly refused to directly address questions from reporters and lawmakers about the intentions or impact of cuts to the LIHEAP utility bill assistance program for American families.
Then on May 6, energy advocates noted that Trump’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year also omits funding for Energy Star, a voluntary program administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to certify and label energy-efficient home appliances so consumers know which options may help reduce their utility bills. The Bush-era initiative costs $32 million per year and results in more than $40 billion in annual savings for American families, Paula Glover, president of the nonprofit coalition Alliance to Save Energy, told CNN.
“That’s a return of $350 for every federal dollar invested,” she said.
In a proposal released May 12, the Republican-led U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce also took aim at almost every home efficiency and clean energy tax credit passed in 2022 as part of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
“They’re essentially eliminating tools to help people save money and energy,” Cynthia Zwick, director of Arizona’s Residential Utility Consumer Office, told The Arizona Republic. “It’s very difficult to understand what the benefit of that is. It does seem odd at a time when the whole country is concerned about energy grid reliability.”
The makings of an energy emergency
Grid failure during Arizona summers does not come without human costs.
In May 2023, The Republic reported that researchers at Arizona State University had calculated that a simultaneous heat wave and a blackout power outage lasting five days in Phoenix could send more than 800,000 people to the emergency room with heat illness and could kill more than 13,000. The study found that, with only 3,000 emergency room beds available, America’s hottest big city was unprepared for such an event.
One way Arizona has tried to keep its residents safe during such heat waves, barring an extended outage, is by providing utility bill assistance so that vulnerable low income families and the elderly, who may not be able to leave during especially hot weather as snowbirds tend to do, are able to maintain reasonable indoor temperatures without risking rent money and eviction into deadly temperatures.
During July 2023, when Phoenix logged what was then the hottest month on record for any U.S. city, a record 7,000 renters faced eviction across Maricopa County. At the end of that year, a record 645 people had died from heat-related causes in the county. Of those, 45% were unhoused but another 25% were indoors. In 88% of those cases, victims had an air conditioning unit that was not in use, often due to disrepair or in an effort to limit energy costs.
Zwick said studies have shown a clear link between eviction rates and an inability to pay utility bills. This remains an issue even though Arizona passed a law in 2021 prohibiting utilities from disconnecting customers between June 1 and Oct. 15 or when temperatures are above 95 degrees — because when the moratorium ends, those utility bills still come due along with next month’s rent. And missed payments to utility companies on top of greater demand driven by population growth and energy-intensive industries like data centers leads to higher electricity rates, extending the struggle for low income residents into the following year.
Yet not only have Trump’s recent moves undermined efficiency efforts to cool homes with less energy, advocates say, his proposed budget eliminates all funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which has for decades been the backstop for tens of thousands of Arizona households struggling to keep their AC units running.
His administration also fired all federal workers managing LIHEAP fund distribution at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on April 1, stunting the program even if Congress doesn’t pass the budget cuts.
“From a very simple, basic sense, losing LIHEAP funding is going to impact customers’ ability to pay their bills and stay connected to their service, which is electric and gas,” Zwick said. “And it also affects, longer term, the utilities’ budgets as well.”
Now, as Arizona approaches another summer likely to continue the recent trend of breaking high temperature records, local groups and leaders say that — while there may not yet be a true “national energy emergency” — Trump’s actions since that declaration could bring about an energy-related public health crisis.
“I don’t know another way to say it other than there will be increased deaths in our community as a result,” Kelly McGowan, executive director of the anti-poverty nonprofit Wildfire, told The Republic. “LIHEAP is the largest funding source we have to help vulnerable and low income households pay their energy costs. If this program gets pulled out of the community, there is no way to backfill the impact that it’s currently having.”
LIHEAP cuts threaten Arizona’s progress on cooling needs, grid reliability and clean energy
First funded through congressional appropriation during the Reagan administration in 1981, LIHEAP was originally conceived as a way to help residents of cold-weather states keep their heat on during winters. But as average atmospheric warming has increased, so has the program’s support for cooling.
Since October 2022, nearly $75 million in federal LIHEAP funds have helped more than 71,000 households in Arizona pay their gas and electricity bills, according to the Arizona Department of Economic Security. This includes some members of local tribes, though 9 of the 22 tribal nations within state boundaries also receive their own federal LIHEAP allocations, DES public relations chief Brett Bezio told The Republic on May 12. (And some tribal members still live without access to home electricity.)
An analysis by The Arizona Republic of data on LIHEAP expenditures from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services shows that Arizona’s share of LIHEAP funding has increased from just 0.4% ($9.5 million) of the U.S. program total in fiscal year 2001 to 1% ($61 million) in fiscal year 2023. More than half of that $61 million went directly to Arizonans’ cooling bills (as opposed to almost none in 2001), while another 8.6% supported home weatherization services like replacing doors, windows and insulation to improve efficiency.
Nationwide over the past two decades, data shows the share allocated to cooling increased from 2.3% to 9.1%.
These numbers reflect a growing recognition of the need to help vulnerable U.S. residents keep their AC on during longer, more frequent and deadlier heat waves as human-caused climate change and urban development make average summer temperatures more extreme across the globe.
“Heat kills more individuals than the cold weather does, but it wasn’t until every state started heating up and our temperatures in Arizona became unbearable that the compelling argument around heat seemed to pick up more effectively now,” Zwick said. “But yeah, we’re just behind the curve on all of that.”
Arizona has, in recent years, been one of the states ahead of the curve on solar energy, electric vehicle and battery storage projects and clean energy job creation. Current Republican-led proposals to cut funding for those programs put more than $13 billion in local investments and more than 13,000 Arizona jobs at risk, a majority of which are in Republican-held districts in the state, according to the communications organization Climate Power.
If Arizona utilities lose the $31.8 million in federal LIHEAP funding that helped cover 2023 cooling bills that might otherwise have gone unpaid, they are left with less money to pursue new clean energy projects or otherwise add reliability to electricity grids across the state.
Some consumer advocates suspect that’s precisely the aim of Trump’s “energy emergency” and subsequent actions.
“Certainly, President Trump wants to increase use of coal and other fossil fuels,” said Stephanie Chase, a former attorney and current researcher with the Energy and Policy Institute. “It’s really frustrating to see both a push toward using more fossil fuels that are going to cause our climate to warm and the length of time with extreme temperatures to worsen, and then at the same time cutting financial support for people who really need to be able to pay their air conditioning bills to live comfortably in Arizona.”
“There are also ripple effects from this program for the utilities,” Chase continued. “Of course, they want to minimize how much debt they have from customers.”
That may be why the vice presidents of Arizona Public Service and Tucson Electric Power as well as the general manager of Salt River Project all issued statements in support of legislation introduced on May 8 by U.S. Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, both D-Ariz., to protect LIHEAP funding and ensure it is distributed equitably between states.
An equal division between states would roughly double Arizona’s recent share, according to The Republic’s analysis. But sources say the bill seems unlikely to pass given the Republican majority in Congress and Trump’s current push to eliminate the program entirely.
That decision may not come until late this year, said Laura Wickham, the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project’s senior Arizona associate, leaving grid reliability and aid availability hanging in the balance. In the meantime, she reaffirmed efficiency measures as the best option to manage energy resources, utility bills and air quality.
“What’s better than producing electricity, just not ever using it, right?” Wickham said.
As it is, only about 8% of households in Arizona that are eligible for LIHEAP funding actually receive it, according to McGowan of the local aid association Wildfire. So the utilities already supplement that with low-income assistance programs of their own. Some applicants get money from multiple sources.
McGowan said careful blending of federal, state and utility funding helps keep the whole aid network intact.
“Often the LIHEAP benefit is not meeting the full energy need,” she said. “But it’s the largest funding source we have to help low income households pay their energy costs. We’ve seen all of the utilities over the last couple of years raise rates, and that is a burden for vulnerable households at a time when their fixed income is not keeping pace with their costs.”
“You get to the point where these community agencies have become so effective at braiding funding sources to holistically meet the need that you pull one of them out and you kind of crumble the program,” McGowan added.
‘It will definitely put a burden on a lot of people’
Shirley Ross and her husband, Charles, make up one of the vulnerable Arizona households benefitting directly from LIHEAP funds. They retired 15 years ago to a remote stretch of desert about 100 miles southwest of Tucson that is home to just a few hundred people, because they thought the location offered a place to stretch their limited income out across their final years.
The couple spent their lives working, Shirley as a director and instructor at a truck driving school and Charles running a mobile RV repair service. They kept a strict budget, but expenses hadn’t left them with much to retire on.
“I had relatives that lived in Tucson and so we found a house that was in foreclosure and it took everything we had to get into the home,” Shirley Ross told The Republic. “We happened to get a pamphlet about LIHEAP with our gas bill. So we looked into it and found we would qualify due to our income and age to get some help with our gas and electricity. It gave us an opportunity to use the money instead to buy food, which was real nice.”
At first they were getting around $480 a year to help cover their energy costs, she said. Federal allocations are sent directly to utility companies and are used to cover customer bills until they run out. Then it went up to $800, then to $1,200 annually as both temperatures and rates increased. (Cochise County, where the Rosses live, has the highest electricity rates in Arizona.)
“We have more days now that are over 100 compared to how it used to be,” Ross said. “I would say that the combined gas and electric bill has doubled since the time we moved in, from about $100 to $200 a month.”
Shirley and Charlie Ross also benefitted from LIHEAP weatherization funding for low-income applicants. They received a new swamp cooler, insulation in the attic, a more efficient refrigerator and new heater for the higher elevation winters. The workers told Shirley the old heater likely would have eventually burned down their home.
“They came in and it was absolutely amazing what they helped us with for weatherization,” she said, adding that, with her husband now on oxygen 24 hours a day, they are grateful for any help with their rising utility bill and the assurance that they won’t have to choose between his oxygen and food.
Shirley eventually ended up getting involved as a low-income board representative at her local Southeastern Arizona Community Action Program to help others access LIHEAP funds. She said she thinks most people who need it don’t know about it or don’t have the computer literacy to apply online. SEACAP helps people with this both at their office and in Willcox twice a month.
“Still, it’s really hard to get the information out,” she said. “We don’t have a newspaper out here. We just don’t have a whole lot of ways to tell people about it.”
Ross hadn’t heard about the entire program landing on Trump’s chopping block before her interview with The Republic. She’s hopeful the cuts won’t go through, and thankful that the existing funding, already allocated through September, will get people through this upcoming summer. But she worries about what will happen after that.
“It will definitely put a burden on a lot of people,” Ross said.
Watching all of this unfold from the Wildfire anti-poverty office, McGowan is dismayed at how Trump’s abrupt, destabilizing policy changes and budget cuts make it even harder to keep Arizonans safe in extreme heat.
“Administratively this is difficult,” she said. “We’re creating contingency budgets and scenarios at this time when we’d normally have a concept of what our budget is going to look like for the next year. Instead we’re putting a lot of resources to navigating this uncertainty. It creates a lot of chaos at the local level.”
She and others also worry about what they see as harmful disinformation being spread on issues ranging from what keeps households low income, to what supports grid reliability to what constitutes an actual energy emergency.
“We’ve created a society that benefits from people being in poverty and then also punishes them for being in poverty,” McGowan said. “There’s so much narrative going around right now about waste and fraud in these programs, and it just, that stuff doesn’t bear out when you look at actual data.”
Joan Meiners is the climate news and storytelling reporter at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Her award-winning work has also appeared in Discover Magazine, National Geographic, ProPublica and the Washington Post Magazine. Before becoming a journalist, she completed a doctorate in ecology. Follow Joan on Twitter at @beecycles, on BlueSky at @joan.meiners.bksy.social or email her at joan.meiners@arizonarepublic.com.
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