In a debate laudable for management and substance, candidates for the Republican presidential nomination missed an opportunity. President Barack Obama offered it to them less than a week before the Nov. 10 event.
Produced by Fox Business News and featuring eight candidates with best scores in recent polls, the televised conversation in Milwaukee focused on economics. Taxation, government spending, and regulation received most attention by far. Energy attracted brief commentary but wasn't ignored.
Energy and economics
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio made solid points about how full realization of American energy potential can revive manufacturing. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush included repeal of Obama's Clean Power Plan in a sweeping proposal for regulatory relief and later asserted that 40% of US economic growth recently has come from energy development.
Yet more than 2 hr of Republican conversation about the economy included only one mention of Democratic handling of the Keystone XL pipeline. It was a transitory gripe by Bush that former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic candidate, had changed her stance on the issue. This is regrettable.
The decision announced by Obama on Nov. 6 to reject the Keystone XL border crossing reeks of economic recklessness. Any of the Republican contenders might have profited by pointing out that the decision panders to activists such as Bill McKibben, who led opposition to the project and whose writings appeal for limits to economic growth. In a debate about the economy, a reminder of this affinity of the president, who incredibly declared Keystone XL would have little consequence for growth or employment, would have been illuminating.
More profoundly, the Keystone decision sets an ominous precedent. It's wholly symbolic, wholly political. During 7 years of supposed study, Obama's State Department had found the project to be environmentally benign. It even said Keystone XL's contribution to emissions associated with climate change-the central concern-would be minimal. Obama's decision means that political caprice matters more than analytics and that economic activity can at any time yield to environmental obstructionism. The US thus becomes a riskier place in which to consider investment than it should be.
The economy, moreover, now officially falls below climate fear in the hierarchy of national interests. This adjustment is central to Obama's agenda, manifest in restructuring of the electricity system required by the Clean Power Plan. The Keystone decision demonstrates further that any project can be rejected at any time because it emits greenhouse gases. In a debate about the economy, this framework for decision-making screams for attention.
Although climate change consistently ranks low in polls of public concern, the politics of climate can't be ignored. During television coverage of the Milwaukee debate, the network displayed a graphic assessment of public worries derived from social media on which the issue didn't appear. Yet climate alarm increasingly steers policy decisions in the direction of economic peril. With global leaders soon to convene in Paris in pursuit of an international agreement on climate-change mitigation, the potential for costly error is extreme.
Sharpening contrasts
Candidates concerned about the economy, therefore, shouldn't hesitate to attack the case for sacrifice, certain though they'll be to be branded "deniers" for doing so. Activists undermine their own agenda, weakened as it is by temperature observations at odds with dire model predictions, with tactics of fanaticism. They've assembled a record of exaggeration, absolutism, and pertinacity. Now they're conjuring scandal from e-mail records showing ExxonMobil had employees worried years ago about possible links between fossil energy and global warming. Only zealots can see that as anything other than reasonable discussion.
Debaters in Milwaukee thus might have used Obama's Keystone gesture to sharpen contrasts between their and competing approaches not only to the economy but to democratic tenets as well. Obama's decision had news value on Nov. 6 that it will lack in later debates. It remains instructive history, though, like the self-discrediting shenanigans of activists who don't understand economics-or maybe don't care.