Editorial: If Clinton had won...

July 22, 2019

Concerning US President Donald Trump’s July 8 victory speech on environmental policy, a hypothetical question offers useful context: What would be happening now if former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton had been elected to the White House?

Trump expressed a clear message: “We will defend the environment, but we will also defend American sovereignty, American prosperity, and we will defend American jobs.” And for that he drew predictable criticism, quickly obscured by uproar over a misguided Twitter tirade against four liberal congresswomen.

Typical response

Succinctly typical was this response from Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee: “The president who touted our country’s clean air today is the same president who has repealed the Clean Power Plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions, rolled back mercury pollution rules, and diminished the ability of states to address harmful emissions to air and water. The president who praised America’s so-called leadership on the environment is the one who actually abdicated American leadership by withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords, a retreat from the world’s greatest environmental challenge.”

So what would have happened if Trump had not, as Carper complained, “pursued more than 80 rollbacks of environmental policies?” What if Clinton were president?

Opponents of Trump’s environmental policies meticulously fail to acknowledge that most changes since 2017 have been to regulatory splurges of Barack Obama. The former president was strangling American business, especially the energy business, and impeding recovery from the 2008-09 recession. Trump mainly relaxed the chokehold. A booming economy and robust job growth attest that change was in order.

With Clinton as president, the economic squeeze would have tightened. The Clean Power Plan would be in effect. Oil refineries would be facing egregious new emission controls for which Obama’s regulators lacked time. Releases of methane from natural gas operations would be subject to unnecessarily strict regulation. The oil and gas tax increases Obama never managed to win would be falling into place in diplomatic obeisance to the Paris accord, along with, probably, some form of carbon taxation. Large oil and gas projects, especially pipelines, would be politically impossible to develop.

And the economy might be back in recession or certainly headed in that direction. Energy costs would be much higher than they are now and rising. The economic lift from oil and gas development would be constrained. And a public never particularly anxious about climate change would be disillusioned, having learned the hard way that latter-day promises of prosperity in an economy force-fed costly energy amount to green puffery.

Speculation? Of course. But the governments of other countries have submitted their economies to transformative environmental regulation in pursuit of climate leadership and suffered for the effort. Canada is the closest case in point. Backlashes against imposed energy cost and suppressed resource development have ousted governments in several Canadian provinces and might well do so at the national level in October. Canada’s climate leadership is in peril.

Having accelerated Obama’s turn onto this course, as she surely would have done, Clinton now would be headed for defeat in her bid for a second term in 2020. If she had given green initiatives early priority, she probably would be contending with a Congress controlled by Republicans elected in a midterm reaction against rising energy costs and lingering economic torpor. Another would-be climate leader would be a prematurely lame duck as the aggressively green agenda, now held at bay by a stubborn president, died of political causes.

‘Punishing Americans’

Trump seems to sense this, just as he seems to have sensed the potency, surprising to many, of the reactionary populism that propelled him into office. “Punishing Americans is never the right way to produce a better environment or a better economy,” he said on July 8.

If Democrats don’t heed that insight and quickly change direction on energy, Trump’s presidency will last through 2024, vicious tweets and all.