Gaffes and facts

April 18, 2016
Widespread toleration of reckless overstatement must mean something. In presidential campaigns of the recent past, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders long ago would have been laughed out of the news cycle-the latter for making outlandish promises and the former for general outlandishness.

Widespread toleration of reckless overstatement must mean something. In presidential campaigns of the recent past, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders long ago would have been laughed out of the news cycle-the latter for making outlandish promises and the former for general outlandishness. Yet Trump leads the delegate count in the Republican nomination race, and socialist Sanders is menacing enough to have jerked presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton irretrievably leftward.

Both candidates capitalize on visceral political urges-Trump among conservatives and Sanders among liberals. They vent pressures heretofore building in silence where Americans live-as opposed to where their government conducts it affairs. And in compensation for this service, Americans in astonishing numbers seem willing to forgive the serial gaffe and proclamation at odds with observable reality.

The DEP

A recent Trump departure from customary rectitude shows this phenomenon at work on a subject crucial to the oil and gas industry. On a Fox News program in early April, the real estate baron said, "The Department of Environmental-I mean the DEP-is killing us." In a debate a month earlier, Trump said he'd eliminate the "Department of Environmental Protection" along with the Department of Education.

The US government, of course, has no "Department of Environmental Protection." Clearly, Trump meant the Environmental Protection Agency. To detractors, he once again had displayed the lack of preparation, if not thoughtlessness, betrayed by many of his utterances. To supporters, though, the misidentification of a disparaged agency scarcely mattered. More important to them are the boldness of his position and the abandon with which he argues for it. Others can worry about details.

With the EPA-or DEP, or whatever-Trump was mostly right on policy and deserved credit for pressing the issue. The EPA doesn't need killing. Much of what it does is important. What it needs is constitutional chastening.

The agency is out of control. It has become a tool of the environmental activists occupying too many of its key positions, regulating with unwarranted zeal and testing limits of Executive Branch authority. Recent examples of EPA's signature excess that directly affect the oil and gas industry are proposals to control emissions of methane from new and existing facilities and the possible regulation of oil field emissions of ozone precursors. The consequent costs of these regulations would of course diminish drilling and production now in fast retreat because of a market slump. And they're unnecessary. Methane emissions and ground-level ozone concentrations are falling.

But the Obama administration EPA never would let progress stand in the way of regulation. It will exaggerate claims about the "social cost of methane," inflate its justifications with "cobenefits," and try-as it did with the costly Mercury and Air Toxics Standard-to outrun legal challenges with strenuous implementation schedules. This is how activism subverts responsible governance. EPA has governed irresponsibly throughout the presidency of Barack Obama.

So while Trump got the name wrong, his assertion that the EPA "is killing us" contained subtexts that, to the oil and gas industry, rang deeply true. Inside Trump's expanding political orbit, facts yield to poignancy. The approach can make a presidential candidate seem appallingly uninformed. So far, though, it works.

The frac ban

The problem with Sanders is that his deeper truths ring true only to voters unworried about who pays for everything the candidate promises to spend on behalf of equality and justice. In a recent foray into oil and gas, Sanders got nothing right at all.

Repeating standard hyperbole against hydraulic fracturing, Sanders on Apr. 11 called for a nationwide ban against the decades-old well-completion step, refinements to which have invigorated US energy fortunes. His press statement excoriated "the extreme and risky method of drilling." Sanders doesn't know completion follows drilling. He wants to end important work about which he knows precious little.

Press critics and night-show comedians enthusiastically ridiculed Trump's EPA miscall. About Sanders's larger mistake on hydraulic fracturing, much less was heard.