At the start of a presidential election year, with the US facing fateful energy decisions and a still-populous slate of mostly smart and articulate contenders for the Republican nomination pounding issues hard, Donald Trump's biological insults of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton captivate news. Good grief.
Obsession with Trump degraded a Dec. 15 Republican debate on national security. Neither questioners nor candidates saw fit to extend discussion to an inescapably related and nearly simultaneous development: President Barack Obama's unilateral alignment of his country with international flailing against climate change. Although candidates managed to illuminate shades of difference on terrorism, immigration, and how those issues interrelate, collateral issues gave way to the question whether anyone could land a haymaker on Trump's prideful chin. The answer was no.
Energy in oblivion
On several levels, this is regrettable. The real estate tycoon might commandeer the nomination but can't be elected president. He exaggerates too much, treats policy questions simplistically, and offends too many voters in too many identity groups. He and his defiant supporters must think those lapses don't matter. They're wrong. Because Trump makes a controlling majority of Americans, across the whole political spectrum, cringe, his bombastic candidacy represents a futile distraction that plays to corrosive Republican caricatures and steals attention from candidates with broader appeal.
In the December debate, moreover, Trump's talent for show-stealing shoved into oblivion any chance to address the crucial link between climate activism and security. That link is energy, which is inseparable from matters of national defense and central to policy-making related to climate.
On energy, the 2016 presidential election will be historically important. The Democratic candidate will promise to press the Obama administration's crusade to replace hydrocarbons, with its aggressive targets for greenhouse-gas emissions, hopeless attempts to choreograph energy use, and environmentally unwarranted toughening of pollution standards to raise costs of fossil energy. By choking economic growth, the measures Obama pursues and a Democratic successor would sustain inevitably will weaken defense capabilities already in decline.
Supporters of Obama's state-centered overhaul of the energy economy parrot the claim that climate change represents the main threat to US security. Apparently, Americans don't believe that. When surveyed, most of them rank security against terrorism high on their lists of worries and climate change consistently and remarkably low.
Against what he must see as this plebian misunderstanding, Obama offers condescending lectures and indefensible assurances about possibilities and cost. He has lost his audience. In word and deed he aligns himself with extremists wanting to replace economic energy with costlier substitutes and insists such a transition can be effected politically at net economic gain. That argument defies logic and has been disproven in every country that has turned it into policy. Americans have good reason to doubt Obama's promises about cost-free energy transformation, the late-game attempt to implement which will make this a feverish year for energy policy.
The executive orders and regulatory initiatives certain to proliferate in 2016 as the president campaigns for climate sainthood will, if implemented, stagger the economy and strain the budget, diverting funds from defense and the fight against terrorism. They'll be bad for the economy, bad for security, and defended with the usual, smirking refusal to acknowledge what should be obvious by whoever wins the Democratic nomination. The proffered mistakes should be easy targets for Republicans willing to respond.
A perishable transformation
The perishability of Obama's energy transformation is no excuse for inaction. Once Americans experience the costs, learn how much more of their freedom and treasure the climate crusade will claim, and feel the real insecurity that results from growing threats and weakening defense, they'll demand a reversal of course.
Until that happens, though, many mistakes can occur. Americans shouldn't have to endure the pain, which can be prevented by honest answers to better questions than anyone asks now about energy and security. A presidential campaign headlined by serious issues rather than celebrity antics should be the perfect forum.
