While international leaders toiled in Morocco to manage climate change, Americans elected as their president a billionaire inexperienced in government who ran against elitism and called global warming a hoax. Oil and gas might not stay underground by decree, after all.
Donald Trump disproved everyone who considered his election impossible-a view expressed here more than once. Faults and all, he won. The outcome manifests surprisingly pervasive dissatisfaction with the course of US politics.
An eviscerated legacy
Trump's victory thus eviscerates Barack Obama's energy legacy. The president famously claimed to be pursuing an "all of the above" energy policy. In reality, his administration sought to replace fossil energy with costlier alternatives, all in service to worst-case scenarios of climate change. Trump promises to dismantle the regulatory prison Obama's administration has been building, with its knee-jerk resistance to oil and gas projects. For the industry that develops those projects, this is the most important consequence of a stunning election.
Trump also promises to make oil and gas policy practical and economically fruitful again. He will, for example, expand federal leasing, encourage hydraulic fracturing, and approve border transit of the Keystone XL pipeline expansion. He seems further inclined to appoint industry leaders to top energy positions. Much as decision-making would profit from the infusion of expertise, no one should expect miracles. The political establishment distrusts industry affiliation. It treats knowledge about oil and gas with mind-closing suspicion able to block reasonable policy. At least it has done so in the past. Since Nov. 8, the political establishment isn't what it used to be.
So the oil and gas business faces a constructive flipping of the political climate. If Trump keeps his promises, the government will encourage rather than discourage its work. It should welcome the change. But it also should work to ensure the climate never flips back-which it can with a single election.
To that end, the industry should encourage Trump to strip from his newly won office some of the authority it has taken upon itself. The presidency is dangerously imperious. It became this way over many years. But the process accelerated during the presidency of George W. Bush, who stretched constitutional limits in the struggle against terrorism, and ran amok in the Obama administration, which treated constitutional limits as theoretical annoyance. Much of the regulatory oppression under which the industry lately struggles originated in agencies exercising authority with reckless expansionism.
Trump has said he will rescind some of the executive orders and rulings through which the Obama administration essentially wrote its own laws. He also has promised to bring the Environmental Protection Agency and other nodes of bureaucratic fanaticism under control. Both would be admirable moves, good not only for the economy but also for governmental integrity, now seriously diminished.
A necessary worry is that Trump will take these steps on behalf not of respect for the separation of powers but of a course reset with the presidency still dominant. The latter option won't do. The country needs restoration of the constitutional balance that keeps presidential activism-whatever its political leaning-in check, popularly and constitutionally. And the oil and gas industry needs assurance that no future president feels at liberty to hamstring it by executive order.
What voters think
Obama's lordly approach to governance compromises the climate meeting in Morocco. Without US participation a year ago in Paris, COP-22 delegates probably wouldn't now be discussing implementation of an agreement setting national limits on greenhouse gas emissions. But US participation is legally fragile. Obama signed an agreement he insisted was not a treaty, which would have required Senate ratification he knew he couldn't win. His action has no more legal force than a personal statement. And his Paris statement conflicted with wishes of most Americans, who choose not to kneel before official elitists at the altar of climate change.
On Nov. 9, voters made their thoughts on these matters thunderously clear.
