It didn’t take long to establish the rhythm of last night’s presidential debate. Hillary Clinton would respond to a question, providing details of her proposals, then make sure to dangle just a little … shiny thing out there for Donald Trump. For example, at the end of a question on the economy, Hillary made a slight move into energy.
CLINTON: They've looked at my plans and they've said, okay, if we can do this, and I intend to get it done, we will have 10 million more new jobs, because we will be making investments where we can grow the economy. Take clean energy. Some country is going to be the clean- energy superpower of the 21st century. Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it's real.
TRUMP: I did not. I did not. I do not say that.
CLINTON: I think science is real.
TRUMP: I do not say that.
Ahem.
It wasn’t the last time energy came up. And, believe it or not, it wasn’t even the worst thing that Trump said.
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CLINTON: And I think it's important that we grip this and deal with it, both at home and abroad. And here's what we can do. We can deploy a half a billion more solar panels. We can have enough clean energy to power every home. We can build a new modern electric grid. That's a lot of jobs; that's a lot of new economic activity. …
TRUMP: She talks about solar panels. We invested in a solar company, our country. That was a disaster. They lost plenty of money on that one.
Now, look, I'm a great believer in all forms of energy, but we're putting a lot of people out of work. Our energy policies are a disaster. Our country is losing so much in terms of energy, in terms of paying off our debt. You can't do what you're looking to do with $20 trillion in debt.
Trump’s “we invested … that was a disaster” almost certainly refers to Solyndra. In 2009, Solyndra had a lock on a particular form of “thin film” solar cells that could be applied to surfaces. They were not as effective as silicon panels, but their flexibility—both literally and metaphorically—and their low cost promised to make the company a major player. At the time the company received a $535 million U.S. Energy Department loan guarantee, it was valued at $2 billion.
Then it failed, taking those loans with it. But why Solyndra failed isn’t a story of “solar doesn’t work.” In fact, it’s the opposite.
What happened wasn’t that Solyndra’s technology didn’t work, or the market for solar was smaller than expected. What happened was that the cost of the more effective silicon panels dropped so quickly that there was no room for Solyndra’s less effective tech. In just 18 months, new techniques for making polysilicon dropped production costs of silicon panels by 89 percent.
In fact, 2010 was the start of an explosion in solar panel sales that’s seen the market grow at an astounding rate.
Growing 43 percent year over year, the U.S. saw 2,051 megawatts (MW) of solar photovoltaic (PV) installed in the second quarter of 2016. According to GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association’s (SEIA) latest U.S. Solar Market Insight report, this marks the eleventh consecutive quarter in which more than a gigawatt (GW) of PV was installed.
By 2011, there were more people working in the solar industry than there were coal miners in the United States. That gap has continued to grow over the years. At this point, there are at least four times as many solar workers as coal miners, and while mining jobs continue to fall, solar now accounts for more than 1 percent of all new jobs.
While Trump is insisting that “our energy policies are a disaster,” the truth is that American energy is more abundant, cleaner, and cheaper than it has ever been. Under President Obama, the United States produced more of its own energy than at any time since 1971.
But that still wasn’t the worst energy-related thing Trump had to say. The worst thing was something Trump had said before, and it came as he wandered through Iraq.
TRUMP: Or, as I've been saying for a long time, and I think you'll agree, because I said it to you once, had we taken the oil -- and we should have taken the oil -- ISIS would not have been able to form either, because the oil was their primary source of income. And now they have the oil all over the place, including the oil -- a lot of the oil in Libya, which was another one of her disasters.
First, ISIS is not in control of any oil fields in Libya. ISIS-associated fighters have killed some guards at oil facilities, but they control none of their own. None. Not one. In 2015, ISIS captured the city of Sirte and an associated dam and power plant. Then ISIS lost its training center in Libya, was kicked out of a series of towns, and last month they lost Sirte.
But there’s a bigger problem with Trump’s statement than just inaccuracies on who controls what. What Trump is arguing for here is a war crime. And it’s not the first time he has suggested it.
P.R. nightmare aside, there’s a very good reason the Bush and Obama administrations did not just take Iraq’s oil: doing so would have violated several treaties ratified by the Unites States and constituted a war crime.
The U.S. may have kept the spoils of war “in the old days,” but not since 1907. The Hague Conventions banned the seizure of enemy property except when absolutely necessary. Article 23 (g) in particular states that it is “especially forbidden” to “destroy or seize the enemy’s property, unless such destruction or seizure be imperatively demanded by the necessities of war.” Given the U.S. military’s extensive resources– and that Trump wanted to use the proceeds to pay widows– it’s hard to argue that seizing Iraqi oil would have been a military necessity.
That Donald Trump can suggest a war crime and it doesn’t even make the list of issues drawing media attention says something about the number of times Donald Trump simply failed in the first debate. However, this is not an issue that can be allowed to sink, because—along with torturing and attacking terrorists’ families—Trump will come back to it again.