Donald Trump doesn’t have a philosophy. He just has grudges. When Trump cheers for more oil and coal, it’s not because he has some deeply held belief about the relative merits of fossil fuel and renewables. It’s not even because he’s applying some conservative principle about land ownership and the freedom to pipe unlimited smoke into the if-no-one-owns-it-it-doesn’t-count atmosphere. Nope. There are no principles. Except the principle that says once an enemy, always an enemy.
The reason Donald Trump is wearing a hardhat and cheering on Bob Murray in his effort to squash as many miners as he can before he dies, goes back to a single incident.
In short: Trump decided to build a golf course on the Scottish coast. The Scots had already approved an offshore wind farm for the same area. Trump was annoyed that the turbines would spoil the view. So he spent years fighting the wind project in the courts and lambasting Scottish political leaders on Twitter, building up more and more frustration at turbines generally to oppose this specific project.
And then the worst possible thing happened. Trump lost. Because the Scots were not idiots and refused to give into his idiot reasoning and shrill attacks.
That’s it. That’s exactly how deep and well thought out Trump’s whole plan for energy is. Those people who like wind power screwed with him, so ... Scott Pruitt and Rick Perry and a heap of executive orders designed to do nothing but give those environmentalists a big smoke in the stack.
But Trump’s fight with men in skirts gifted the world with more than just the United States pulling out of the Paris agreement. Yes, his actions may kill us all in the long term, or even the medium term, but that conflict also causing misery right now.
We’re going to be self-supporting, we just about are now. We’re going to be exporting energy — he doesn’t want that. He would like Hillary where she wants to have windmills. He would much rather have that because energy prices would go up and Russia as you know relies very much on energy.
The “he” in that quote is Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump was arguing that Putin would rather have had Hillary Clinton as president because she would have kept energy prices high and, he said earlier in the interview, “decimated” the military. This is the argument he was making.
Trump’s argument here is that he’s keeping energy prices low, and Putin hates that. Only … no. First, the reason that coal mines have been closing has nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with cheap natural gas. And there’s another player … wind. At this point wind energy is actually cheaper than coal. Wind’s price continues to drop and it doesn’t require the huge up-front costs of a coal-burning power plant. The one-two punch of gas and wind, with solar coming up along the outside rail, has simply destroyed coal in the marketplace.
In fact, the nation’s very first “clean coal” plant, after falling years behind schedule and running billions over budget, decided to not burn coal, but would use all natural gas instead. That happened just last month, despite all Trump’s vaunted love of coal, despite his assurances that coal would make a comeback, despite claims that this “very clean coal” plant was on the way to show us the future.
Last year, PolitiFact rated former president Barack Obama’s assertion that wind was cheaper than “dirty fossil fuels” in Texas as true. In March of this year, Moody’s argued that new wind power was threatening established coal plants — for market reasons.
The thing keeping energy prices low is the vast over production of oil and gas that happened under President Obama. No pipeline is going to make them lower. No executive order cheer leading for coal is going to help. As wind edges ever downward (and solar prices continue to plummet) the price of energy will continue to fall, with not a bit of help from Trump.
There are a couple of things that could make energy prices move sharply up. One would be if the government were to actively engage in policies to restrict the growth of wind and solar. It would throw hundreds of thousands of people out of work for the express purpose of making things worse … but that seems entirely within the scope of Republican actions.
The other way energy prices could be raised, and quickly, would be by threatening world stability. Say, by threatening to start a war with North Korea or, even better, take actions against Iran. Maybe support disruption in the Gulf. None of those policies seem at all reasonable or helpful to the United States, but … didn’t Obama want to keep peace in these places?
Hmm.