If you're in the oil and gas business, news about energy policy from Washington, DC, this year probably makes you smile. Other developments might make you want to break something.
Oil & Gas Journal's editorials and columns, inevitably focused on oil and natural gas, have brightened in tone since January.
During the 8 years of Barack Obama's presidency, the problem for an OGJ editorial writer was choosing which abomination to flay that week. There were so many. Obama disliked fossil energy.
Correcting errors
President Donald Trump, clearly appreciating oil, natural gas, and their technological renaissance, wants to correct his predecessor's errors.
His administration is relaxing regulation of producers and refiners, reopening federal land for leasing, and encouraging development of unconventional resources.
Trump is withdrawing the US from an international climate agreement that would clamp oil and gas work in legal shackles. He approved the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. And he entrusted the Environmental Protection Agency to an administrator with a sharp distaste for fanaticism.
For half a year's work, that's a commendable record. OGJ commentary has welcomed the improvements and hopes for more.
No more now than ever, though, energy policy isn't the whole story. Too much of the rest of the Trump story is discouraging.
Yes, the president faces unabashedly hostile news media. Yes, his administration is plagued by leaks that some Washington veterans describe as unprecedented in frequency and harm.
Trump and his apologists squeeze those annoyances hard for excuses. But predatory reporters and subversive bureaucrats no more tell the whole story than energy-policy improvements do.
The White House is chaotic, dangerously so.
Trump diehards who blame this observation on "fake media" aren't paying attention.
When the president began publicly belittling Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from investigations into Russian election-meddling, the White House looked rocky, at best.
Trump's apparently worried by a special prosecutor's probe that he elicited himself when he carelessly hinted about revelatory recordings before firing Federal Bureau of Investigations Director James Comey.
If the administration did not look chaotic then, it surely began to do so when the president, still crabbing about Sessions, hired New York financier Anthony Scaramucci to oversee White House communications and administrative decapitations.
Scaramucci called a journalist to disparage Chief of Staff Reince Priebus in unpublishable terms the evening before firing him-then complained that the reporter reported what he said.
Ten days after this self-described front-stabber took charge of communications, new Chief of Staff John Kelly, a former Marine general who had been secretary of homeland security, ran him out. Whether Kelly will have enough authority to impose order remains to be seen.
At this writing, the White House was looking for a new communications director, whose priority goal should be cancellation of Trump's Twitter account.
Presidential tweets regularly undermine cabinet officials and allies in Congress, serving mainly to illuminate a troubling impulsiveness.
Trump effused this whopper on July 31, the day of the Kelly-Scaramucci shuffle: "No WH chaos!"
Unbelievable, literally and figuratively.
Alas, Trump seems as far from abandoning Twitter as he is from tweeting to coherent purpose.
Congressional Republicans might be losing patience. While the president was abusing Sessions and uncaging Scaramucci, Congress was recording another failure to repair health-care policy and trimming presidential authority in a Russian-sanctions bill.
Where all this might lead is anyone's guess-another problem for, say, foreign governments craving steadiness among superpowers and Americans needing to plan anything.
Unfortunate context
For the oil and gas industry, the context is unfortunate.
Trump understands how resurgent production of fluid hydrocarbons builds wealth, lowers energy costs, and boosts the general economy and national security. He deserves credit for aligning energy policy with this constructive insight and will continue to receive it in OGJ commentary.
What cannot be ignored is hazard to the vision's political durability from association with an administration disposed, for some reason, to self-destructive turmoil.
About the Author
Bob Tippee
Editor
Bob Tippee has been chief editor of Oil & Gas Journal since January 1999 and a member of the Journal staff since October 1977. Before joining the magazine, he worked as a reporter at the Tulsa World and served for four years as an officer in the US Air Force. A native of St. Louis, he holds a degree in journalism from the University of Tulsa.