President Shapiro: An All-of-the-Above Democratic Energy Strategy

Hero photo: File:Wind Turbines and Power Lines, East Sussex, England - April 2009.jpg — Diliff, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

01 The record and the scenario

Josh Shapiro's verifiable energy record is the most deliberately un-ideological in either party's 2028 conversation. On January 30, 2026 — building on the March 2025 framework — he unveiled the “Lightning Plan,” which he calls “a bold all-of-the-above energy plan” for Pennsylvania: PRESS (Pennsylvania Reliable Energy Sustainability Standard), a 50%-by-2035 clean portfolio covering nuclear, hydrogen, geothermal, small modular reactors, gas with carbon capture, wind, solar and storage; PACER (Pennsylvania Climate Emissions Reduction Act), a cap-and-invest program to replace the failed RGGI participation, with 70% of revenue returned to consumers as bill rebates; a Community Energy Act; and permitting plus PA EDGE tax-credit expansions — up to $49 million a year for hydrogen, $15 million a year for sustainable aviation fuel at the CNX-KeyState Pittsburgh airport project. His administration projects $252 million in first-five-year consumer savings and $5.1 billion in clean-energy investment.

The record also contains the most instructive climate-policy failure of any Democrat currently in executive office. Pennsylvania entered RGGI by regulation under his predecessor; the Commonwealth Court enjoined it in 2022, ruled it an unconstitutional tax in November 2023, and in November 2025 Shapiro signed Act 45, formally withdrawing Pennsylvania from RGGI as part of a budget deal — the first state ever to exit, under a Democratic governor. Critics on the right price the Lightning Plan's costs in the hundreds of billions; critics on the left note he abandoned the only binding carbon policy the state ever had. Both critiques are part of the record a national all-of-the-above strategy would have to answer for.

Scenario analysis, not a prediction or endorsement: as of September 18, 2026, Josh Shapiro is described in national coverage as a potential 2028 Democratic contender, and he has not formally entered a presidential race. The scenario: assume a Shapiro administration takes office in January 2029 — what could an all-of-the-above Democratic energy strategy actually do in its first 100 days?

02 Day 1: executive orders

The Shapiro Day 1 agenda writes itself from his own record, because nearly everything he has actually done in Pennsylvania — as opposed to proposed — was executive. 1. Permitting: his office has made faster energy-project permitting the signature promise (“fix the permitting process” was in his gubernatorial campaign); the federal instrument is NEPA — a Day-1 order directing the Council on Environmental Quality to complete phase-2 permitting rules (the current administration rewrote them once; a Shapiro administration would rewrite them again, toward speed with environmental-justice review retained).

2. Appointments: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are where an all-of-the-above presidency actually flexes — FERC on transmission and interconnection backlogs, the NRC on advanced-reactor licensing. Day-1 nominees with a siting mandate are the single most durable energy move available, and they need no Congress to nominate (confirmation is the bottleneck — more below).

3. The bully-pulpit price claim: the Lightning Plan's political core — “lower costs” — would translate to Day-1 orders on strategic-reserve policy and domestic-production messaging. He has explicitly rejected the choice between “energy independence” and “climate action” as a false one; the federal version of that argument begins in the first paragraph of the first order.

03 Days 2-30: agency changes

Month one is DOE-and-EPA staffing as doctrine. The Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office — the instrument that financed the first-generation battery and nuclear projects — is a discretionary directorate; a Shapiro order reopening full-speed lending to nuclear, hydrogen and grid projects (the exact technologies PRESS tiers favor) is executable in weeks. The EPA is the harder story: Shapiro's Pennsylvania record shows him slowing regulatory ambition when courts resist (his RGGI appeal aside, he let the legislative route carry the carbon policy), and West Virginia v. EPA's major-questions doctrine means a system-wide power-plant rule is now a statutory-authorization problem. Expect a Shapiro EPA to move on methane rules (existing statutory authority under the Clean Air Act, already litigated and partially upheld) and not to attempt a generation-shifting rule on day 30.

The comparative tell for this series: a Shapiro EPA would look more like a permitting-and-methane agency than a standards agency, while a Shapiro DOE would look more aggressive than any Democrat's on nuclear and gas. That is the “all of the above” trade in institutional form — and his own state's legislature (the House passed the Community Energy Act and PA EDGE expansions; the Senate is the graveyard) is the small-scale rehearsal of the congressional fight to come.

04 The first budget

A first Shapiro budget is the moment “all-of-the-above” meets arithmetic, and his Pennsylvania numbers preview the argument. The Lightning Plan claims $252 million in first-five-year savings, $5.1 billion in investment, and $664 million in cumulative consumer savings by 2040 — financed by rebates from cap-and-invest revenue, tax credits, and portfolio standards. The Commonwealth Foundation's counter-analysis prices the same package at $157.2 billion in new energy costs. Both cannot be right, and the fight a President Shapiro would have is exactly this fight, scaled to the national grid: whether a carbon price with consumer rebates is a savings mechanism or a cost mechanism.

The budget lines to watch: nuclear RD&D (the SMR commercialization money — the technology PRESS treats as a first-tier resource would need federal cost-share, and Shapiro's NGA-panel advocacy of energy permitting is the tell that he sees the two as one system); LPO recapitalization; transmission — the honest constraint every all-of-the-above plan hits, since more sources does not help if the wires are full; and the political question of whether the budget extends the existing clean-energy tax credits (a Democratic coalition demand) alongside new gas and nuclear provisions (the all-of-the-above signature). If a Shapiro budget does both at full size, it is the first budget in either party's history to try.

05 First legislation and what requires Congress

Everything binding in the Lightning Plan was legislation — and that is the deepest lesson of the Shapiro record for a first 100 days. PRESS, PACER, Community Energy, PA EDGE: all bills, all negotiated, most still short of passage in the Pennsylvania Senate. Translated federally: a national clean portfolio standard, any carbon price, and the tax-credit architecture all require Congress, and the Senate arithmetic is the same 60 votes for him as for everyone else in this series. His own state's six-year RGGI saga — regulation, injunction, unconstitutional-tax ruling, appeal, statutory withdrawal — is the demonstration project for why a Shapiro White House would send pricing to Congress rather than attempt it by rule.

What has a genuine bipartisan lane, per his own coalition-building record (labor unions and industry groups stood at his Lightning Plan announcement): permitting legislation — the rare energy item with votes on both sides (Senate energy-permitting bills have repeatedly drawn bipartisan cosponsors); nuclear — SMR and advanced-reactor authorization has been a bipartisan area since the 2020 ADVANCE Act; and transmission siting, where FERC authority plus a statute could actually clear the backlog. A first-100-days Shapiro legislative strategy would lead with those three and defer the standard-and-price package — a sequencing choice his governorship already made once.

The honest scorecard: he can reorganize the executive's energy machinery entirely in 100 days; he can build only the beginnings of a statutory all-of-the-above framework, because his own record proves the statute is the whole ballgame.

06 The comparative question: Shapiro versus the other Democrats on energy

This series has now covered three Democratic energy models: Newsom's (aggressive state regulation and 100%-clean mandates, litigation-tested), Ocasio-Cortez's (the Green New Deal's mobilization frame — the article that follows this one), and Shapiro's (all-of-the-above with a price signal). The verifiable differences among them are narrower than the rhetoric: all three accept the science, and all three would deploy executive power on day one. Where they genuinely diverge is sequencing and coalition — Shapiro is the only one of the three whose plan features natural gas extraction and nuclear in the first tier of a portfolio standard, the only one with an explicit consumer-rebate design, and the only one who has signed a law reducing a climate policy's reach (the RGGI withdrawal) while claiming the climate mantle. That record is either the Democratic party's best general-election asset — a candidate who can win Pennsylvania-type states on an energy-jobs frame — or its most vulnerable flank in a primary, and the first 100 days of a Shapiro presidency would be the test of whether the synthesis holds when it costs something.

One more comparison the record forces: Shapiro and Vance arrive at industrial-energy policy from opposite directions but converge on permitting. Both treat the siting bottleneck as the binding constraint on both manufacturing and clean energy; both have records of saying the quiet part (“build, build, build”) about energy infrastructure. A first-100-days permitting fight is the one energy scenario in which a Shapiro White House and a Republican Senate might actually deal.

07 What courts could constrain

Shapiro's judicial constraint map is the best-documented in this series, because his state already ran the experiment. Executive carbon pricing without a statute fails — the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court's RGGI ruling (an unconstitutional tax imposed without legislative authorization) is the state-level rehearsal of what federal courts would do with a rule-based national carbon price, and the major-questions doctrine since West Virginia v. EPA makes the federal version strictly harder. His own appeal strategy — defend the regulation while building the legislative alternative — ended with the courts mooted by statute, which is the exact outcome a Shapiro DOJ would aim to avoid nationally by leading with legislation.

Permitting acceleration meets the APA and NEPA: phase-2 rules rewriting environmental review timelines will draw challenges from both directions — conservation groups on process-stripping, and the standing question of whether faster timelines are reviewable at all before a project is approved. Methane rules ride existing authority but inherit an active litigation docket. Nuclear licensing is the safest lane — the NRC's statutory framework was modernized by the ADVANCE Act with bipartisan margins, and courts defer heavily there. The summary: of every first-100-days energy agenda in this series, Shapiro's is the least court-dependent by design — because his governorship already taught him which parts of the agenda the courts take away.