Two political celebrities in the US seem able to say anything about energy, no matter how outrageous, with impunity. One of them, of course, is President Barack Obama. The other has ignored energy so far but somehow profits from outrageous utterance on any subject that enters his mind, presumably including energy at some point. Before presidential hopeful Donald Trump gets around to deciding what he thinks about the topic, the oil and gas industry should try to instruct him in a matter of enormous importance that's receiving little attention from other Republican candidates. Otherwise, as always, there's no telling what the New York tycoon might say.
Similar styles
Obama and Trump display similar polemic styles. Neither can advance an argument without disparaging anyone who dares to disagree. Just before announcing his candidacy, Trump avowed, "We can't continue to be led by stupid people who are being led by the wrong people." In the first debate of Republican hopefuls on Aug. 6, Trump repeated his charge that national leaders are "stupid" while neither troubling listeners with details about what might make them so nor describing in much detail policies he'd promote to replace the many he so thoroughly dislikes.
Like Trump, the president relishes the chance to express disdain for opponents. While his brashness doesn't match Trump's, his self-assuredness does. And, unlike Trump, he makes assertions subject to test-apparently assuming no one will compare his statements with observation.
"When you start seeing massive lobbying efforts backed by fossil fuel interests, or conservative think tanks, or the Koch brothers pushing for new laws to roll back renewable energy standards or prevent new clean-energy businesses from succeeding, that's a problem," Obama said on Aug. 25 at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas. "That's not the American way. That's not progress. That's not innovation. That's rent-seeking and trying to protect the old ways of doing business and standing in the way of the future."
To the contrary, what's not the American way is a renewable fuel standard so ill-conceived by Congress and so poorly managed by the Environmental Protection Agency that compliance is impossible. What's not the American way is an Executive Branch that claims control over energy production and use on the basis of exaggeration about climate change and risible assertions that increased use of subsidized electricity will save money. What's not the American way is a president willing to repeat, as Obama did in Las Vegas, distortions about "billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars in corporate welfare each year that's going to fossil fuel companies."
Typically, Obama posited a false dilemma laced with mischaracterization: "It's a debate between the folks who say 'no, we can't' and the folks who say 'yes, we can'; between those who fear the future and those who are eager to seize the future." In fact, some "folks" remember the many times the federal government blundered into energy markets and made a jolly mess of things. Oil-price and market controls leap to mind. The Natural Gas Policy Act betrayed official susceptibility to assumptions wholly at odds with physical reality. And who can forget the Synthetic Fuel Corp.? Has the federal government suddenly and somehow become all-knowing about energy? Obama's energy pronouncements indicate strongly that it has not.
Little challenge
Yet the president receives little challenge from the press, even from Republicans competing for their party's presidential nomination, about the painfully costly energy revolution he yearns to impose. Why? Are other issues more important than the very real threat-demonstrated in Europe, Australia, and states now retreating from renewable energy standards and subsidies-of sharply higher costs and diminished reliability of electricity? Or has climate righteousness truly achieved the unassailable status of secular religion?
If the latter proposition is so, maybe the country does need Trump, properly informed, to do what only he can get away with and call what's stupid, well, stupid.