At least Donald Trump wants oil. While seeking the Republican presidential candidacy, he lays claim to oil with characteristic intemperance. That he wants oil nevertheless implies that he sees value in the substance. Neither Democratic candidate even wants it.
They all need strong infusions of realism.
Co-opting mythology
Trump, of course, has made bombast appealing to a so-far commanding share of the Republican faithful. Apparently, the alienated party faction has suspended conventional requirements for argumentation and civil behavior. Trump's candidacy should have collapsed when, in the debate of Feb. 13, he implied George W. Bush deserved blame for terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and accused the former president of lying to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Trump gets away with this kind of leftist prattle because he's Donald Trump-bigger than life, unimaginably wealthy, unencumbered by the need to explain himself coherently. Bush lied because-by gosh!-Trump says he lied. End of discussion-except that the allegation about lying is supported by no evidence and makes no sense. Why would anyone order an invasion asserting the false existence of horrible weapons while knowing mission success would expose the ruse?
No less objectionable than co-opting liberal mythology is the real estate mogul's repeated promises to demolish the Islamic State-"Cut off their heads!"-and to "take the oil." Someone should explain to the candidate that precious little oil waits in tanks for some hero to swoop in and cart away. Because oil exists underground and must be produced over time, to "take" it inescapably means to conquer and control territory. In Middle Eastern countries, Trump's rhetoric must be chilling. In the US, it's chillingly undiplomatic.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders assert no such claim to the ground of others, of course. To them, pulled leftward as both are by richly funded climate activism, ground is where oil should stay.
To avert "cataclysmic change," proclaims Sanders's web site, "we must leave the vast majority of global reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil in the ground." The socialist senator from Vermont would "tax polluters causing the climate crisis," ban Arctic drilling, ban offshore drilling, block pipeline projects, stop exports of LNG and crude oil, ban hydraulic fracturing-in other words, implement the antioil agenda of environmental extremists. And what about the industries these policies would wreck? "Our transition away from fossil fuels must be fair to those currently working in the energy sector, which means those workers and their families must be able to depend on safe, living-wage jobs." Right.
Clinton's energy program is less radical but still fanciful, embodied in the promise to cut oil use by one third within 10 years. She would tax fossil fuels and use proceeds to pay for costlier energy forms, pretending this can be accomplished at acceptable cost.
Because Sanders, whose utopianism sets ingenuous hearts aflutter, has become a formidable opponent, the former secretary of state increasingly marches to liberal drums. According to the liberal magazine Mother Jones, Clinton this month told activists several times she supports a moratorium on fossil fuel production on federal land. Last July, she said she wouldn't accept a ban until alternative energies were "in place."
The costs of halting production of fossil energy on federal land would start with the $8.8 billion/year the government would forgo in royalties, bonuses, and rents and climb steeply from there with the effects of shutting down stymied industries. Refusing to develop natural resources has consequences irresponsibly ignored by advocates of the mistake.
Common qualities
Republican and Democratic strategies embraced by these three aspirants to high office clearly differ. Sanders and Clinton want no oil; Trump wants all the oil he can "take."
But the positions have in common two qualities that shouldn't escape notice in a contest for the presidency. They assert state adventurism in markets and foreign affairs that Americans should find alarming. And they're impracticable to the point of lunacy.