Illustration
by Yann Bastard for Bloomberg
By Kevin Crowley
The governor was
fuming. The federal government had just pulled
funding for what could have become a
multi-billion-dollar energy project to fuel
ships, trucks and buses in one of America’s
largest industrial states.
“No matter what DC
tries to dictate,” he raged at this intervention
to withdraw government support, “we’ll continue
to pursue an all-of-the above” strategy.
These types of
demands for inclusive energy policies became
widespread during President Joe Biden’s term,
when Republican politicians and their oil
industry backers routinely castigated Democrats
for restricting fossil fuels while subsidizing
low-carbon technologies.
But the angry
governor in the example above from earlier this
year was California’s Gavin Newsom, a Democratic
front-runner for the next presidential contest
and the party’s loudest critic of President
Donald Trump. Echoing recent Republican attacks,
Newsom called out Trump’s decision to pull money
from a West Coast clean-hydrogen
energy hub as an ideological move that’s
the antithesis of “common sense.”
It’s a sign of how
all-of-the-above energy politics have suddenly
changed in 2025. In the latest example this
week, the Trump administration suspended
leases for all five wind farms under
construction off the East Coast. Meanwhile,
Newsom, a staunch clean-energy supporter, has
spent recent months promoting more oil
production, reducing fossil fuel regulations and
nixing plans for a profit cap on refineries.
Sensing that plug
prices are replacing pump prices as a key
political battleground, some prominent Democrats
are now taking on the all-of-the-above mantle as
quickly as Trump and his allies are abandoning
it in their drive to curtail renewable-energy
projects. The governor-elect of Virginia,
Abigail Spanberger, ran on
an all-of-the-above energy policy in the
country’s top location for power-hungry data
centers. Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro calls himself
“an all-of-the-above energy governor” while
running a key swing state. New York Gov. Kathy
Hochul’s recent embrace of natural gas is part
of her plan to
boost “reliable and clean” power, in a textbook
example of all of the above.
“There’s clearly a
political motivation for it,” said Ben Cahill,
director of energy markets and policy at the
University of Texas at Austin. “Democrats have
realized that affordability is going to be a big
issue in the next election season.”
The play for
energy’s center ground is made possible by
Trump’s aggressive moves to kill wind and solar
projects at a time when power demand is expected
to grow 35% by
2040 due to the unprecedented build-out of
data centers for artificial intelligence.
Nationally, electricity costs rose 5.1% in the
12-month period ending in September 2025 and are
expected to rise further as the power system
undertakes upgrades to cope with extreme weather
made worse by climate change.
Trump’s moves
against renewable energy contradict more than
two decades of GOP policy. Since George W.
Bush’s presidency, Republicans have combined
support for oil and gas with backing for growth
in wind and solar power. The focus on energy
abundance — rather than elimination — fit well
with Republicans’ preference for free markets.
Crucially, it also acted as a rhetorical shield
for oil and gas interests in a world that
increasingly viewed fossil fuels as the major
cause of climate change.
But Trump has
transformed the Republican position into a
preference for some energy resources and
opposition to others. He declared an energy
emergency in January to wield sweeping Cold
War-era powers to fast-track pipelines, expand
power grids and save struggling coal plants
while encouraging oil producers with constant
calls to “drill, baby, drill.”
Those efforts are
increasingly twinned with attempts to stifle
clean energy. Now, it’s the clean-energy
industry’s turn to feel aggrieved.
Read the full
story, including the origins of “all of
the above” during the Clinton era. You can subscribe
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the politics shaping the energy transition.
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