Tag: Russian President Vladimir Putin

Inside Vladimir Putin’s Quest for Eternal Youth

Vladimir Putin, now 73, has spearheaded a major Russian state-backed longevity program called “New Health Preservation Technologies,” unveiled in 2024 with a reported budget of around $26 billion. This initiative focuses on anti-aging research, including gene therapy, bioprinting (3D-printing living tissue), xenotransplantation (growing human-compatible organs in animals), cryotherapy, and related technologies. It aims to extend healthy lifespan, with official claims of saving 175,000 lives by 2030.

AI generated by ChatGPT

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Just how close are the super rich to achieving medical immortality?

Inside Putin’s $26 Billion Quest for Longevity

From mini-pigs and organ printing to cryotherapy and genetics, Russia’s president has turned antiaging research into a Kremlin priority

By Bojan Pancevski
May 28, 2026 at 8:00 pm ET

When Vladimir Putin was captured by a hot mic telling Xi Jinping that humans could achieve immortality by replacing their organs, some dismissed the exchange as eccentric small talk between aging autocrats.

In fact, during the conversation at a Beijing military parade last September, Putin appeared to be describing a Kremlin-backed longevity initiative that has become one of Russia’s flagship scientific projects.

Like Silicon Valley billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel, Putin has long been fascinated with antiaging research. But in Russia, Putin’s quest to stave off decline is now a state priority relying on methods as wide-ranging as organ printing, harvesting mini-pigs and exposure to ultralow temperatures.

Last month, Russia’s government announced that scientists are developing a gene-therapy treatment aimed at slowing cellular aging as part of “New Health Preservation Technologies,” Putin’s $26 billion longevity initiative.

…Read more: https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/putin-longevity-antiaging-92dee6e8

What Putin and Xi were allegedly talking about, replacing worn out organs – plenty of people have had organ transplants, and received a new lease of life. But I’ve never seen credible research which suggests aggressive organ replacement extends lifespan, other than the obvious benefits of replacing an organ which has ceased to function properly. But perhaps this is because nobody has attempted to replace all their organs, at least all the organs which are replaceable.

The immune suppression therapies which accompany organ transplantation carry their own risks. I have a friend whose daughter is currently in an out of hospital after a major organ transplant, the doctors are really struggling to get the anti-rejection drug therapy right. And when they do get it right, my friend’s daughter will have to live with a lifelong reduction in her resistance to cancer, the anti-rejection drugs which help the body accept transplanted organs reduce the body’s ability to recognise abnormal cancer cells.

It’s not just dictators who are playing the life extension game. Google may have been early entrants to the game of unlocking the secret of eternal youth. In 2012 futurist and pioneering machine learning expert Ray Kurzweil was appointed to help Google master language processing, which raised a number of eyebrows in the high tech industry. Kurzweil is a legendary machine learning expert – he first appeared on CBS in 1965 at the age of 17 to display his machine learning skills, and is still going strong. But Kurzweil is also a major advocate of the technological singularity and transhumanism movement, and has repeatedly expressed a strong interest in medical life extension. Perhaps his duties at Google go beyond helping to advance their language processing technology.

Kurzweil estimates AI will exceed human intelligence in the early 2040s, and very much wants to be around to see this happen. His prediction is looking a lot more likely now than when he originally made this prediction in 1999, in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines.

Of course, nobody with the money or the resources is waiting around for super intelligent machines to make such technology available to the masses – they want to punch through, use their billions of dollars or in Russia’s case the resources of an entire nation to compress decades of medical advances into an injection they can receive sometime next week.

Before you dismiss it all as ridiculous, there are genuine scientific hints that greater longevity may be possible, and that the first breakthroughs may not be that far in the future.

Caloric restriction is something which can be done right now. Something strange happens to the body when you reduce food consumption to the equivalent of one cheeseburger per day – everything seems to slow down. Rats, hamsters, even monkeys given caloric restriction diets tend to live significantly longer and have less health problems than their fatter cousins. But before you rush to empty your freezer, this kind of extreme diet, bringing your body to the brink of death by starvation, carries substantial risks. Such diets require constant medical supervision to ensure you don’t tip over into a life threatening health crisis. You have to be born with the right genes – not everyone’s body can take this kind of abuse.

So please have a long chat to your doctor before attempting anything like this. More information is available on this US government web page.

Obviously life would be a lot more fun if you could have the benefits of caloric restriction without having to starve yourself. One of the most interesting breakthroughs comes close to achieving this – a small genetic tweak which promotes production of PEPCK-C in muscle tissue.

From the US Government national library of medicine;

Born to run; the story of the PEPCK-Cmus mouse*

Richard W Hanson 1, Parvin Hakimi 1

  • Author information
  • Article notes
  • Copyright and License information

PMCID: PMC2491496  NIHMSID: NIHMS55747  PMID: 18394430

The publisher’s version of this article is available at Biochimie

Abstract

In order to study the role of the cytosolic form of phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase (GTP) (EC 4.1.1.32) (PEPCK-C) in skeletal muscle, PEPCK-Cmus mice were created by introducing the cDNA for the enzyme, linked to the human α-skeletal actin gene promoter, into their germ line. Two founder lines generated by this procedure were bred together, creating a line of mice that have 9.0 units/g skeletal muscle, as compared to 0.080 units/g in muscle from control animals. The mice were more active than controls in their cages and could run for up to 5 km, at a speed of 20 m/min without stopping (control mice run for 0.2 km at the same speed). Male PEPCK-Cmus mice are extremely aggressive, as well as hyperactive. During strenuous exercise, they use fatty acids as a fuel more efficiently than do controls and produce far less lactate than do control animals, perhaps due to the greatly increased number of mitochondria in their skeletal muscle. PEPCK-Cmus mice also store up to five-times more triglyceride in their skeletal muscle but have only marginal amounts of triglyceride in their adipose tissue depots, despite eating 60% more than controls. The concentration of leptin and insulin the blood of 8 to 12 month of PEPCK-Cmus mice is far lower than noted in the blood of control animals of the same age. These mice live longer than controls and the females remain reproductively active for as long as 35 months. The possible reasons for the profound alteration in activity and longevity caused the introduction of a simple metabolic enzyme into the skeletal muscle of the mice will be discussed.

Read more: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2491496/

PEPCK-C helps the body convert fat into glucose. In most mammals, including humans, this is a slow and limited process – humans in particular have bodies optimised to surviving long periods of starvation, so our body is full of limit switches which help tear down unnecessary muscle, restrict our energy levels, fill our muscles with lactic acid when we exercise, and take many other steps to discourage us from burning fat stores.

Mice also have such limit switches. The results of disabling this particular limit switch in lab mice were extraordinary – not only did the mice live longer, but they could run for hours without getting winded. And that lactic acid buildup which causes muscle pain after exercise was barely present in the tissues of the modified lab mice.

The following is a video of an ordinary mouse alongside a PEPCK-C super-mouse.

There was a side effect – the modified mice were hyper aggressive. Star trek fans would immediately think of the fictional character Khan – a genetically modified superman with extraordinary fighting ability, who almost stole the Starship Enterprise from Captain Kirk. But if you’re super rich or an evil dictator, maybe the thought of becoming even more aggressive towards everyone else would seem a small price to pay for a longer time walking among the living.

Before you rush out and demand your shot of PEPCK-C pep juice, so far the effect has only been demonstrated in lab animals which were modified as embryos. Nobody knows how to retrofit such a genetic tweak to adults, in mice or humans.

The impact on society and the global balance of power of a substantial longevity breakthrough such as a PEPCK-C treatment which works on adults would be profound. Not only would all the super-rich start living longer, agents of whoever developed such a longevity treatment would have a powerful new lever to influence others. An offer of a pill or injection which provides an extra 25 years of good health and boundless physical endurance in return for betraying country or government would buy a lot of souls.

In conclusion, we just don’t know how close the super rich and powerful are to lengthening their own lives. But given tantalising medical hints that life extension is possible, that drastically improved quality of life in old age is possible, given that the adjustment required to achieve the first step on this path is simple – increase the expression of a single peptide – and given the gathering synergy of artificial intelligence and medical science, my prediction in the next decade we’ll start to see a handful of super-rich and powerful people looking ridiculously healthy well beyond their time, achieving at least limited success in their quest for personal immortality.

Is Trump Embracing Europe’s Energy Suicide?

Lenin’s aphorism — “there are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen” — has seldom felt more apt. Since the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska three months ago, global energy geopolitics has convulsed in a series of dizzying turns that have left analysts and investors alike struggling to keep pace. The meeting that was hailed as a bold attempt to initiate peace in Europe, ‘reset’ US-Russia relations and stabilise energy markets has instead opened a Pandora’s box of further US sanctions on Russia and recriminations of Putin by Trump.

A painting of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump seated side by side during a summit labeled 'Pursuing Peace' in Alaska, 2025, with a blue backdrop.

Is Trump Embracing Europe’s Energy Suicide?

Tilak Doshi

Russian oil sanctions imitate Europe’s failed moralistic policies

Lenin’s aphorism — “there are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen” — has seldom felt more apt. Since the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska three months ago, global energy geopolitics has convulsed in a series of dizzying turns that have left analysts and investors alike struggling to keep pace. The meeting that was hailed as a bold attempt to initiate peace in Europe, ‘reset’ US-Russia relations and stabilise energy markets has instead opened a Pandora’s box of further US sanctions on Russia and recriminations of Putin by Trump.

After raising hopes of possible peace for Ukraine when President Trump announced that he would soon be meeting his Russian counterpart President Vladimir Putin in Budapest, he then announced just a few days later that work on a second summit had halted. The abrupt cancellation of the proposed Budapest meeting suggests that US-Russia diplomacy has collapsed for the foreseeable future. Instead, the US seems to have adopted the maximalist demands of its European allies and is once again calling for immediate unconditional ceasefire. The US-Russia confrontational temperature was raised another notch by the ramping up of US sanctions on Russia that went well beyond what the previous Biden administration had invoked.

The Alaska Gambit

At the Alaska summit, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin struck what appeared to be a pragmatic understanding. Trump, reverting to his businessman instincts, signalled that Washington would support negotiations to end the Ukraine conflict on terms acknowledging battlefield realities. This meant, in plain language, that Kyiv would have to cede territory to Moscow and remain a non-NATO neutral country. The “unconditional ceasefire” demanded by European leaders and the Biden-era foreign-policy establishment was, Trump argued, “unrealistic given the battlefield situation” and hinted at land-swap ideas as the way forward to a negotiated peace.

Putin, for his part, floated the prospect of joint US-Russian ventures to explore the immense oil and gas reserves of Russia’s Arctic. The Wall Street Journal reported that senior ExxonMobil executives were in secret talks with Rosneft to return to the massive Sakhalin project – a joint venture which was abandoned after Russia’s invasion in 2022 – after having been given the green light by US authorities as part of the Ukraine peace process. President Putin also offered US businesses an opportunity to launch joint ventures to exploit Russia’s vast reserves of critical minerals and rare earth metals.

For a moment, the global energy markets exhaled. Oil prices softened a little in the immediate aftermath of the Trump-Putin Alaska summit on August 15th 2025, with Brent crude and WTI futures declining by 1-2% over the following day or two. This dip was attributed in part to optimistic signals about potential US-Russia energy collaborations, including joint ventures in the Arctic. The mood was one of cautious optimism — until it wasn’t.

From Alaska to Budapest — and Back to Sanctions

Within weeks, Washington’s mood soured. Reports emerged of new Russian offensives near Pokrov, with Western media framing them as proof that Putin had used the Alaska talks as a smokescreen. Russia hawks in the Trump administration – Secretary of State and (acting) National Security Advisor Marco Rubio and Special Envoy Keith Kellogg and Republican congressmen such as Senator Lindsey Graham – seemed to have little time for negotiations on terms outlined in the Alaska summit.

The White House leaked plans to supply Kyiv with Tomahawk nuclear-capable cruise missiles, a move possibly designed to placate the hawks in Washington DC and Brussels but guaranteed to provoke Moscow. Predictably, Putin said that it would constitute a severe escalation requiring direct participation of US military personnel — implying it would cross a red line akin to direct aggression.

In response, Trump, in a characteristic burst of frustration, told reporters he was “disappointed” with Putin and was “re-evaluating” the entire diplomatic process. Then came the Budapest debacle. Trump cancelled what was to have been a follow-up summit — one he had personally proposed just a few days before — and, in a twist of theatrical self-contradiction, imposed sweeping new sanctions on Russia’s two major oil producers, Rosneft and Lukoil. According to Bloomberg, it was Rubio who finally convinced President Trump to take “ownership” of the US proxy war on Russia and place the sanctions on Russia’s oil companies. Henceforth, President Trump can no longer call it “Biden’s war” with any shred of credibility.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that: “Given President Putin’s refusal to end this senseless war, Treasury is sanctioning Russia’s two largest oil companies that fund the Kremlin’s war machine. We encourage our allies to join us in and adhere to these sanctions.” It was as if the Alaska summit which had initially signalled a tentative meeting of minds between Trump and Putin to step away from the maximalist position of ‘immediate unconditional ceasefire’ – pushed by Ukraine’s Zelensky and Brussels – was scrubbed from memory. The same administration that had, only weeks earlier, promised a new era of pragmatic engagement had reignited the sanctions war with a vengeance.

From the Kremlin point of view, this was a familiar pattern: Western flirtation followed by betrayal, as in the affair over the Minsk accords which Angela Merkel later admitted was a ruse to buy time for Ukraine to be armed by NATO. For the rest of the world — particularly the Global South — it was confirmation that the so-called ‘rules-based order’ had become a synonym for Western hypocrisy and chaos in global energy markets.

Rosneft is Russia’s largest oil company by production (40% of national output), followed by Lukoil (15-20%). Together they account for a significant 5% of global output. At the limit, using broad estimates of demand elasticity for oil, a complete stop to oil production by the two companies would lead to a price shock of 25- 30% in the short run. Brent at around $65 per barrel currently would jump up to $80-$85, a major shock. In the event, markets reacted to the US sanctions with initial jitters but quickly stabilised, as traders anticipated ‘workarounds’.

The continued use of Russia’s so-called ‘shadow fleet’ (i.e., those vessels not insured by Lloyds of London) and use of non-dollar settlements by Indian and Chinese oil companies working via proxies has evidently obviated the EU’s 19 sanctions packages over the past three years, resulting in relatively limited impact on the Russian economy or its energy exports. A full cessation of oil exports by Russia’s two major oil companies is unlikely and ‘limited flows’ via non-direct channels will persist, balancing energy security with compliance risks.

Europe’s Moral Grandstanding — and Energy Suicide

While Washington swung from conciliation to confrontation with Russia, Brussels marched steadfastly towards self-harm as it has over the past two decades in pursuit of its delusions of eco-socialism. While US big tech firms are looking at reviving dormant nuclear units at Three Mile Island and elsewhere in the country for their datacentre needs, Germany’s green-obsessed government is imploding mothballed nuclear plants to ensure that they can never be revived. On October 25th, two cooling towers at the former Gundremmingen nuclear power plant in Bavaria were demolished, almost four years after the last reactor was shut down.

With electricity prices at triple the US level and the highest in Europe, Germany’s de-industrialisation is gathering terminal velocity. Following essentially zero GDP growth since 2018, corporate bankruptcies in Germany have reached their highest level in a decade, with 11,900 insolvencies recorded in the first half of 2025, a 9.4% increase compared to the same period in 2024.

Europe’s economic powerhouse now has automakers – one of its core sectors – on their knees. Its most iconic car manufacturers are collapsing. Porsche’s operating profit has dropped by 99% in 2025, falling from approximately €4 billion to just €40 million. Its parent company, Volkswagen AG, has no money to produce new car models due to cash flow problems and a shortfall of €11 billion for next year. By August 2025, Germany’s industrial production was over a fifth smaller than the trend over 1997-2017 would have predicted.

Graph illustrating the decline of industrial production in Germany from 1993 to August 2025, showing a significant drop of 22.2%. The chart includes actual production data and an extrapolated trend line.

Germany’s latest public embarrassment, and a sign of its increasing geopolitical irrelevance, was paraded when German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul on Friday postponed an imminent diplomatic trip to China, over “a dearth of meetings” on his schedule. China is now Germany’s largest trading partner. In plain English, the Chinese said, ‘don’t bother coming’, after being subject to hectoring by bumptious German leaders on the Taiwan issue, economic relations with Russia and other matters such as China’s ‘blocking of semiconductor shipments to Europe’. In August, Wadephul had proclaimed that China was providing “crucial” support to Russia, enabling President Vladimir Putin’s ongoing war against Ukraine.

Yet another arrow in Europe’s moral quiver concerns ‘corporate social responsibility’ or ESG. The European Commission’s latest proposal for corporate-responsibility codes contained in its Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive would require all firms operating in the EU to document the “human-rights” and “climate-impact” credentials of their entire global supply chains. In practice, this meant that energy companies would have to disclose not just emissions data but political affiliations and labour practices across multiple jurisdictions.

The reaction from producers was swift and scathing. In an extraordinary joint communiqué issued last week, the US Department of Energy and Qatar’s Energy Ministry warned that they could “reconsider LNG supply commitments” if the EU persisted with its intrusive regulatory regime. The world’s two largest natural gas producers were on the same page — defending the sanctity of commerce against Brussels’s moral imperialism.

Yet the EU seems determined to press on. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, invoking the “strategic autonomy” mantra, has pledged to end all dependence on Russian oil and gas by end 2027 — a goal that is as unlikely as it is self-defeating. Despite 19 rounds of sanctions and a significant decline in trade volumes since 2022, the bloc remained Russia’s third-largest trading partner in 2024, after China and India.

Even sympathetic observers now admit that Europe’s decarbonisation zeal has outpaced its economic common sense. The ‘Green Deal’, conceived in the salons of Brussels, is meeting the cold reality of physics and finance. Energy cannot be legislated into existence; it must be produced, transported and consumed — and for that, hydrocarbons, the substrate of civilisation, remain indispensable.

The BRICS Counter

While the Atlantic powers engage in the escalation of war rhetoric against Russia à la Zbigniew Brzeziński’s “grand chessboard” of American primacy and its geostrategic imperatives, the rest of the world is starting to decouple from the Western alliance. Russia, China and India have accelerated their energy integration, trading crude and LNG in yuan, rupees and dirhams rather than dollars. BRICS nations have been discussing a basket-based settlement currency to bypass the Western financial system since 2022, having witnessed the total economic war that the Western alliance had unleashed on Moscow including the freezing of its foreign exchange assets worth over $300 billion. For Russia, this is both necessity and opportunity: sanctions and the seizing of its financial assets in Western capitals have forced deep import substitution, re-direction of trade flows and innovation. With the shift to multipolarity, the de-dollarisation trend has gained momentum.

India’s Energy Minister, Hardeep Puri, recently dismissed Washington’s threat of secondary sanctions as “coercive unilateralism”. New Delhi continues to buy discounted Russian oil, refine it and re-export the products — often to the same European markets that claim to boycott Russia. With the latest US sanctions, however, Indian refiners are adjusting their volumes of Russian purchases to avoid the risk of retribution by US authorities.

Beijing, meanwhile, has become Moscow’s indispensable partner. Bilateral trade is now dominated by energy and technology exchanges settled in yuan. When asked to comment on the Trump administration’s move to impose sanctions on two major Russian oil companies, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said on Thursday that China opposes unilateral sanctions, which lack a basis in international law and UN Security Council authorisation. There is no credible scenario where China kowtows to imperious American demands on the shape of its political and economic relations with Russia.

This Eurasian realignment underscores the central paradox of Western sanctions: the more they are deployed, the less effective they become, as warned by Gita Gopinath, the IMF’s Chief Economist. Each new sanctions package merely accelerates the fragmentation of the global economy into competing blocs and chips away at US dollar dominance. What was once a unipolar system anchored by the Bretton Woods system, the dollar and NATO is morphing into a multipolar order driven by resource pragmatism and regional resilience.

For President Donald Trump, the consequences are immediate and personal. With mid-term congressional elections looming, rising fuel prices could prove politically fatal. American motorists are unforgiving: $5 gasoline at the pump has sunk Presidencies before. Trump’s own base — the working-class voters who rallied to his promise of “energy dominance” and no more “forever wars” — now watch in dismay as the administration’s erratic sanctions and mixed signals destabilise markets and risk escalating wars.

The irony is stark. By sanctioning Russian oil companies and flirting with punitive tariffs on Chinese imports, President Trump risks replicating the inflationary spiral that he blamed his predecessor for. The Federal Reserve can do little to offset supply shocks driven by geopolitics. A tightening of global oil supply by US sanctions, compounded by Europe’s moralistic policies and OPEC’s cautious output stance, could send prices soaring into the 2026 election season.

The Long Arc of Energy Realpolitik

The events since the Alaska summit encapsulate the contradictions that have enveloped President Trump’s nine months in power in his second term. European and UK leaders insist on their moral posturing, unable to reconcile their rhetoric of ‘climate justice’ with the material realities of industrial civilisation. Simultaneously, they claim the imperative to ‘defeat’ Russia. Trump’s instinct to pursue pragmatic engagement with Russia was sound in principle — economic and energy cooperation is the surest path to peace — but his execution was undone by domestic politics and war hawks in his own administration as well as by US allies in Europe (with significant exceptions like Hungary and Slovakia which refuse to dance to Brussels’s globalist tune).

President Putin plays the long game. He knows that Europe’s pledge to wean itself off Russian energy has boomeranged on its executioners. Geography and thermodynamics are on his side. Even if Brussels cuts direct imports, Russian molecules in a fungible trade will continue to flow through intermediaries — refined, rebranded, relabelled but ultimately Russian.

As the proposed Budapest summit collapsed in recrimination and sanctions tighten once more, the world confronts a hard truth: there can be no stable global energy order without cooperation among its major producers. Trump’s Alaska initiative, for all its flaws, at least recognised this. His subsequent retreat — under pressure from Washington’s hawkish foreign-policy establishment and Brussels— marks yet another missed opportunity to bridge the East-West divide through shared material interests.

Europe’s bureaucrats, meanwhile, continue to legislate against physics, demanding energy without emissions and growth without natural resources. The result is predictable: industrial decline, political unrest, establishment attacks on increasingly popular ‘far Right’ conservative opposition parties and a steady erosion of global influence. For those who still believe that the West can dictate the terms of global energy exchanges, the past three months offer a stark reminder. The world has changed; in a multipolar world, power now resides where the resources are and what battlefield realities determine, not where the moralistic lectures come from.

Lenin’s decades have indeed happened in months if not weeks — and unless Western leaders rediscover the virtues of realism over rhetoric, of realpolitik over hypocritical moralism, the next few weeks and months may bring decades more of continued Western decline.

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.

Why Trump Needed to Declare a National Energy Emergency

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. The October 7 terrorist attack in Israel. Sky-high inflation. The crushing price of groceries and other consumer goods. Pain at the pump.
One throughline connects some of the greatest failures of the Biden presidency: bad energy policy.

From Watts Up With That?

By Brian Morgenstern Sam Lyman

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. The October 7 terrorist attack in Israel. Sky-high inflation. The crushing price of groceries and other consumer goods. Pain at the pump.

One throughline connects some of the greatest failures of the Biden presidency: bad energy policy.

To right the wrongs of his predecessor, President Donald Trump took the unprecedented step of declaring a national energy emergency on his first day in office. In his inauguration speech, Trump vowed to “bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again right to the top, and export American energy all over the world.” In contrast to the national malaise of the Biden years, Trump’s ambitious energy agenda promises a new morning in America. His commitment to “energy dominance” will subdue our enemies, tame the tiger of inflation, and usher in a new era of tech supremacy.

To understand why Trump declared a national energy emergency, it is first critical to understand where Biden failed on this issue. Consider the human toll of Biden’s energy policy in three arenas: Ukraine, Israel, and Mainstreet America.

Putin’s war on Ukraine was boosted by Biden’s own war on U.S. oil producers.

In the first year of his presidency, Biden kneecapped domestic LNG production by blocking new oil and gas leases on federal lands, canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline, and imposing impossible standards on domestic fossil fuel producers. As a result, U.S. crude oil production remained woefully behind pre-pandemic levels for the first year of Biden’s presidency—to the tune of approximately one million fewer barrels of oil per day.

Cheering on Biden’s restrictions just as much as the environmental lobby was Russian President Vladimir Putin. As the U.S. retreated from global oil markets, Russia advanced, increasing its production by nearly nine hundred thousand barrels a day in 2021. Putin’s ability to eat into the U.S. market share in the energy sector put Russia on strong economic footing in the leadup to its invasion of Ukraine.  

After the invasion, the high price of oil fueled Russia’s war machine, kept its economy alive, and shored up its currency in the most critical years of the Ukraine conflict. Biden could have undermined Russia’s military campaign and decreased global oil prices simply by removing his restrictions on U.S. producers, allowing them to drill to their full capacity. But he refused and exacerbated the problem in 2024 by pausing new LNG exports to European allies. Thousands of innocent Ukrainians suffered as a result of Biden’s energy policies.

Sadly, Biden’s war on U.S. oil producers not only strengthened Russia—it also empowered Iran and endangered Israel.

Like Russia, Iran was able to capture a significant portion of the global oil market share that would have otherwise gone to the U.S. were it not for Biden’s harmful regulations. And like Russia, Iran was able to leverage this oil revenue to launch its own war. Using Hamas as its proxy, the Iranian regime engineered the October 7 terrorist attack against Israel, sparking one of the bloodiest conflicts in the region’s history.

From Europe to the Middle East, Biden’s disastrous energy policies made the world a more dangerous place. They also made it more expensive.

Mainstreet America was just another casualty in Biden’s war on oil. Everyday citizens foot the bill for this war in the form of high inflation, which reached a peak of over 9% in 2022 and caused the dollar to lose over 22% of its purchasing power in only four years. Exacerbating the highest inflation our country has seen in a generation were rising energy prices that resulted from the Biden administration’s attempts to curb fossil fuel production in favor of renewable energy.

Seeing the damage wrought by his predecessor’s energy policies—both here at home and abroad—Trump had no choice but to declare a national energy emergency. Thankfully, the new president understands what the former never did: Energy is the base layer of all matter, life, and human activity. Or, as Einstein put it, E = mc2.

As the fundamental currency of the universe, countries rise and fall on their ability to maximize energy production. And any attempt to manipulate the supply-and-demand dynamics that govern its use leads to distortions—not only in global markets but in monetary systems and international politics as well.

Trump intuits this. Which is why “Drill, baby, drill!”—beyond being a catchy slogan—is a promising, first-principles approach to getting our country back on track.

The logic is simple: Biden’s policies hurt energy providers here at home while enriching our enemies abroad. These policies drove up the price of energy and inflation in our country, making all Americans poorer. And they made electricity harder to acquire than ever before just when critical emerging industries in tech and transportation needed it most.

That’s why, as part of his national energy emergency, President Trump must revoke Biden-era energy regulations. Every last one.

The economy of the future—including Bitcoin and AI data centers, electric vehicles, commercial space exploration, and quantum computing—will require far more energy than we are producing today. According to research from S&P Global, electricity demand from U.S. data centers alone is expected to more than double over the next decade, increasing from 185 TWh to 440 TWh. Failing to meet this demand would give China the edge in the race for artificial intelligence, putting both our economy and our national security at risk.

Given the challenges facing our nation, securing energy dominance is the only option.

If the U.S. is to succeed in weakening its enemies, wrangling inflation, spurring GDP growth, and onshoring manufacturing, then it needs to use its God-given energy assets. This includes nuclear, hydro, solar, and yes, fossil fuels.

Almost no clean energy project would succeed without the manufacturing and infrastructure that fossil fuels make possible. Case in point: Texas.

Policymakers in the Lonestar State recognized long ago that oil and natural gas were critical companions in scaling up renewable energy. So in contrast to California, Texas lawmakers opted to encourage fossil fuel production, rather than restrict it. This decision has resulted in more—not less—renewable energy generation overall and the cleanest energy mix in the country. Our country’s leaders should embrace this all-of-the-above approach to energy production.

For the last four years under Biden, the federal government’s foot has been on the brake pad of energy generation. Trump must move it to the accelerator—because cheap and abundant power is the key to a safer world, lower inflation, better tech, and a stronger economy.

Brian Morgenstern is head of public policy for Riot Platforms and served as White House deputy communications director and deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury during the first Trump administration.

Sam Lyman is director of public policy for Riot Platforms and served as chief speechwriter to United States Senator Orrin Hatch.

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.