Expect chaos and drama with Trump: David Callaway

One of Scott Besson's key policy aims as the nominee for Treasury Secretary is to produce an additional three million barrels of oil a day. President-elect Donald Trump has also vowed to, quote, drill baby drill. Meantime, analysts expect the U.S. to add about 250,000 barrels a day through the next year. That would be the slowest pace since 2020, according to Bloomberg. Here we've got David Calloway. He is the founder and editor-in-chief at Calloway Climate Insights to discuss. David, it's great to have you in the studio. Thank you so much for making time for us this morning. Talk to me about what you're anticipating under the new administration and how you're thinking that these potential policies, including what we just mentioned from potential incoming Treasury Secretary Scott Besson, could impact energy moving forward. Well, Besson's, you know, clearly was trying to sell himself to the job when he told Trump about his 3-3-3 or triple-three strategy of 3% GDP, 3% deficit cut, 3 million barrels of oil. But we're already at 3% GDP. I think we're at 2.8 or something like that. So that's low-hanging fruit, right? 3% deficit cut, we could talk all day about that. But the 3 million barrels of oil, that's about a 20% increase in what we're doing. We're doing about 15 million barrels of oil a day in the U.S. already. That's huge. And while I have no doubt that Trump wants to drill that much, the markets probably don't need that much. We know where oil prices are today. They're not that high. We're swimming in oil. We've got a whole bunch of renewable energy waiting to be plugged into the grid. So I'm not sure they're going to get that one. Remember, to drill oil and drill shale and tar sands oil, you need the price to be at a certain level to make it economical. So the oil companies may not quite agree with this plan. David, I guess to the degree, what do you fear just in terms of what those setbacks will be? Because also just with Lutnick, one of the recent op-eds that you wrote, just in terms of implementing strategy and what exactly happens, the policies under the Trump administration, very much speculative still at this point. But I guess what do investors need to be aware of that very much are some of those risks? Well, I think investors need to look back to the first Trump administration for clues of what the second Trump administration is going to be. It's going to be chaos. It's going to be drama. It's going to be infighting. The new cabinet that's coming in might not necessarily be the cabinet that is there in two years. We know bringing in all these leaders, Lutnick and Besant. Remember when he brought in Wilbur Ross and Rex Tillerson from Exxon and Steve Mnuchin from Goldman Sachs? Only Mnuchin really lasted the entire term. So there'll be a lot of infighting. I think investors need to take it with a grain of salt. We saw with the tariff comments yesterday on Mexico and Canada, shook markets around the world, even markets that he didn't mention reacted. You know, he's just creating drama and that's what he likes. He likes to operate within chaos. And so investors need to kind of be a little bit wary. You'll see it here at Yahoo Finance, because if you remember, he used to mention in particular stocks and the stocks will go crazy, right? So it's going to be fun as a journalist to cover. I think we can expect a lot of infighting. Probably a lot of these policy goals will be reset over time and Trump will claim that that was his plan all along. But it's interesting because we've, on the flip side, we've heard some investors and analysts telling us that we shouldn't even care about the personnel around him. We should care what he says. He has said he's going to do tariffs. He mentioned it last night, the market moved. He said, drill, baby, drill. Why should we doubt that if he is the one who is in that Oval Office chair? Yeah, he can only do so much given the time that he has during the day. And granted, he seems superhuman, tweeting all night long and stuff. But, you know, the characters around him do mean something and they will be infighting and they will fall in and out of favor with him. But they do mean something to the markets. And especially, you know, you've seen the market react to Besant and somewhat to Lutnick. You know, they are strong Wall Street personalities with huge track records. So it's better to have them in the seat than some of the other cabinet picks that we saw. I think the markets will be OK. And particularly, I think the climate markets and the clean energy markets will do better than most people expect. I think Trump will find he needs that energy if only to satisfy his A.I. goals, which are new over the last 24 hours. Is it Besant or is it Lutnick that is the pick to watch here for climate investors? It's more Lutnick, right? Lutnick is going to be the tariff guy. And that's big work for China, which imports a lot of our solar panels and solar panel chemicals, a lot of our minerals for our electric vehicles. So he's that character. He's also responsible for NOAA, the National Oceanic Administration, which is responsible for all the weather forecasting and climate forecasting and data. Trump hates that agency. He says it's right. It's the thing behind the hoax. So Lutnick is going to be in the hot seat from day one and not particularly well-liked because of the Treasury race and everything that he caused, all the controversy he caused in there in the race for that spot. So I'd be watching Lutnick first. Besant, I think, is a capable hand that will probably do as good a job as Mnuchin did. 30 seconds. How do you expect the private sector to respond on clean energy? I think the private sector will respond to prices and economic ideas. Clean energy is cheaper. It's scaling up at amazing limits, levels, especially solar power. I think those opportunities are still going to be there. David Calloway, great to have you. Thanks so much for coming on set with us. Great to see you again. Calloway Climate Insights founder and editor-in-chief. Thanks so much.