On Thursday, Donald Tweet shared his views on America’s energy future in a North Dakota speech. They are the stuff of conspiracy theories and too much late night tweeting.
tweet, tweet, tweet . . . .
May 26, 2016,
The presumptive Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump, said lots of fun thingson Thursday about climate and energy.
Trump spoke at the North Dakota Petroleum Council conference in Bismarck, at a press conference and in a speech to oil industry executives.
Essentially, he argued that the Obama administration has put forth regulations and lawsuits aimed at stifling fossil fuels in the U.S. “Every single move he’s made has been to block production of oil and natural gas.”
Trump’s “America First” energy policy would largely dismantle safety and environmental regulations that he views as hobbling the U.S. economy, and promote coal and oil exploration, as well as nuclear, solar, and wind power.
Obama, incidentally, promised an “all of the above” energy policy doing the same thing in 2012, angering some of his allies in the environmental community with his support for fracking and offshore oil drilling.
But all that was forgotten on Thursday, when Trump exceeded the 1,237 nominating delegates (by one delegate) he needed to secure the 2016 Republican Party’s presidential nomination. His energy speech delivered some interesting moments, and plenty of pronouncements that made little sense:
1. Coal miners will go back to work, Trump said. That seems unlikely.
Sascha Schuermann / Getty Images
“Federal regulations put coal miners out of business,” he said.
Yeah, no. The real trouble is that natural gas is just cheaper than coal, with prices down 32% from last year, after a warm winter. And the power industry has already made a huge investment in newer, more efficient power plants that burn natural gas, while nobody is building coal plants.
Those fuel prices killed the coal industry, with one-time titans Arch Coal and Peabody Coalgoing bust in the last year. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), natural gas overtook coal this year as the top U.S. provider of energy because of the abundance of cheap, cleaner, natural gas. “Environmental regulations affecting power plants have played a secondary role in driving coal’s declining generation,” according to the EIA.
There are only about 80,000 coal miners left in the U.S.
When asked whether he thought a president could fight market forces making gas cheap and coal costly, Trump demurred. “I love market forces,” he said. “Ultimately I think coal will be very inexpensive,” he added, once mining safety and inspection regulations are removed by his administration.
2. No, we actually can’t cancel the Paris Climate Agreement.
Activists dressed as polar bears at the United Nations conference on climate change outside of Paris. Alain Jocard / AFP / Getty Images
On Earth Day, April 22, 2015, world leaders from 175 nations signed the nonbinding Paris climate deal, committing themselves to limiting global average surface temperature increases below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by the turn of the century.
“Foreign bureaucrats will control what we’re doing,” Trump said of the treaty. “We’re going to cancel the Paris climate treaty.”
That’s crackers. “At best, it is a slogan,” David Victor of the University of California, San Diego, told BuzzFeed News. “But it is not a serious foreign policy strategy nor a viable option.”
The Paris deal is already done — signed and negotiated by nearly 200 countries, who can’t unilaterally reopen its accords for debate. If Trump tried to reopen negotiations, he would find himself talking to an empty room.
What’s more, the U.S., China, France, and a few other countries had essentially forced the “bottom-up” Paris approach, where nations would get to set their own course to cutting emissions, on the rest of the world. The whole point of the agreement was that countries get to figure out for themselves how to cut emissions, not foreign bureaucrats.
“To suggest that the deal be reopened displays a reckless disregard for the infeasibility of the option and also complete ignorance of the harm this would do to the reputation of the U.S. as a reliable partner,” Victor said.
3. No, a “flood of new jobs” won’t come from loosening environmental regulations.
Jeff Swensen / Getty Images
Don’t bet on it. Job estimates tied to new regulations are “a fantasy land,” Michael Livermore of the University of Virginia told BuzzFeed News last year.
A 2012 report found decades of misbegotten job-loss estimates from industry in the run-up to new regulations, and job gains from environmental advocates. In reality, things tend to even out in the big employment picture due to environmental regulations: Workers in one industry or region sometimes lose jobs after regulations take effect, while complementary industries hire more workers or environmental monitoring jobs open up.
“Environmental regulation is not a jobs program,” said Livermore, an author of the Institute for Policy Integrity report.
4. No, windmills are not killing all of the eagles in California, and they’re not killing “millions” of birds.
Tweet Squawk Tweet ! Bird Fight !
Though they do kill some. The Obama administration recently proposed a plan that would allow all industries combined to kill up to 4,200 eagles a year nationwide, in response to a federal judge nixing an earlier plan to allow these “takings.”
A 2013 study by U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologists found that 85 golden eagles and bald eagles had been killed by windmills from 1997 to 2012, and suggested the numbers might be substantially higher. Overall though, the FWS estimated in 2007 there were about 9,789 bald eagle nesting pairs in the lower 48 states. Their recovery is a success story of the Endangered Species Act, despite the wind industry.
Trump also complained that windmills are killing “millions” of birds (of all species), which is also a big exaggeration. Windmills seem to kill about 300,000 birds every year, according toa 2014 report. That’s a fraction of the 6.8 million killed every year by cell phone towers, or the 3.7 million possibly killed by cats.
The strangest thing that Trump said in his speech was “wind is very expensive.” In reality, windmills on land are one of the cheapest sources of electrical power, according to the EIA.
5. Trump promised we’re going to be energy independent. But we already are.
Washington Bureau / Getty Images
Trump embraced “energy independence,” a promise beloved by presidential candidates going back to Richard Nixon.
In Washington-speak, that’s code for not relying on imports of oil to keep people commuting to work in the morning. And for once, politicians’ promises seem to have come true, largely due to fracking and the tight oil boom, which reduced U.S. oil imports to 1973 ratios two years ago.
All this energy independence has a downside: It inspired Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations to turn on the spigots and depress the price of oil. That has caused havoc for U.S. energy firms, with oilmen cheering oil hitting $50 a barrel for the first time in seven monthsnearly as lustily as they cheered for Trump at his speech.
CORRECTION
The Obama Administration proposed a plan that would allow all industries combined to kill up to 4,200 eagles per year nationwide. A previous version of this post incorrectly said the action was limited to the wind industry.
How I Came To Jesus On Global Warming
A Challenge to Donald Trump’s Energy Claims: Economic Reality
By CORAL DAVENPORT
WASHINGTON — In his pledge to aggressively expand American oil and gas production, and his framing of that push as a salvation for the nation’s economic and fiscal health, Donald J. Trump is following in the footsteps of decades of Republican politicians.
But in a market where domestic oil production is already higher than it has been in 40 years, and natural gas production is at a historic high, those proposals have run up against a major problem: the global economy.
As the presumptive Republican nominee spoke in Bismarck, N.D., this week, in the booming Bakken oil fields not far away, oil and gas workers were actually being laid off, victims of their own success and the global energy glut they have helped produce. Plunging oil and gas prices have pointed to a fundamental flaw in Mr. Trump’s argument: At a certain point, production of oil and gas will push prices too low to justify even more production.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries — especially its leading producer, Saudi Arabia — also gets a say. If it decides to keep the spigot cranked, the bar for profitable American production gets higher, investment falls and the sector contracts, regardless of Mr. Trump’s intentions.
“I don’t think he has any knowledge of global energy markets,” said Charles Ebinger, a senior fellow at the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution who watched Mr. Trump’s energy speech. “We’ve laid off thousands of workers in the oil service sector.”
Energy policy experts who followed Mr. Trump’s proposals said that while some hewed to standard Republican orthodoxy, others appeared implausible and ill considered.
“It’s a fairly standard Republican antiregulation, pro-production vision, but with no real details and some outlandish Trumpian flourishes,” said David Victor, director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the University of California, San Diego.
One major consequence of the surge in domestic natural gas production has been a turn by electricity generators toward gas from coal. That has cost thousands of coal jobs. Yet Mr. Trump has both vowed to increase natural gas production even as he promises to restore coal jobs, scoffed Robert N. Stavins, director of the environmental economics program at Harvard.
“Trump will presumably support less regulation and other actions to encourage greater use of fracking. That would tend to lower natural gas prices,” Mr. Stavins wrote in an email. “And, therefore, Trump’s promised support of greater natural gas fracking would actually have the effect of lowering demand for coal, causing more mines to close.”
Mr. Stavins added, “He can’t have it both ways — talk up expanding natural gas supply when in North Dakota, and talk about bringing back coal mining jobs when in Kentucky!”
At a news conference before his North Dakota speech, Mr. Trump said he could bring the cost of coal down as well, by eliminating or easing environmental regulations.
Experts also questioned Mr. Trump’s claim that an aggressive push to expand oil and gas production would increase employment, economic growth and federal revenue.
Even with oil and gas production at or near record highs, the industry is not a large direct employer. Last year, there were 103,000 workers directly employed in oil and gas extraction, and 68,000 workers in coal mining, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yet in his speech, Mr. Trump claimed that the oil and natural gas industry “supports 10 million high-paying jobs.”
Citing research by the Institute for Energy Research, an organization partly funded by the billionaire libertarian brothers Charles and David Koch, Mr. Trump claimed that an aggressive expansion of oil and natural gas drilling would yield a $700 billion increase in annual economic output over the next 30 years, a $30 billion increase in annual wages over the next seven years, more than $20 trillion in additional economic activity over the next 40 years and $6 trillion in new tax revenue.
“This would suggest that his energy policies alone would give a 5 percent boost to the entire economy,” Mr. Victor said. “That strikes me as fantasy. The numbers seem off by an order of magnitude.”
Mr. Trump also laid out plans to spend new federal revenue that he claimed would be generated by new oil and gas drilling.
“We will make so much money with energy that we will start to pay down our $19 trillion debt,” he claimed. “We’ll use the revenue from energy for roads, schools, bridges and infrastructure.”
But energy economists dismissed the idea that new drilling could bring enough money to substantially fund such proposals. In 2015, coal, oil and gas companies paid the federal government $9.6 billion in fees and royalties for drilling on public lands and waters, in a budget of $3.8 trillion. Even with a large expansion of such drilling on public land, experts say it is difficult to predict a new such revenue stream at the scale envisioned by Mr. Trump.
The chief source of federal revenue from coal, oil and gas extraction comes from taxes and fees paid by companies drilling and mining on federal lands and waters, but most oil and gas production takes place on state or private land. Mr. Trump has declared that he will lift regulatory barriers to drilling on federal lands and waters, but experts say that will not be easy.
“It’s not like you just sit in the Oval Office and press a ‘rigs’ button,” Mr. Victor said. “There are tremendous legal and bureaucratic challenges and an extremely long time horizon.”
And as long as the global market remains glutted, companies will be disinclined to lease federal land for new drilling. With the lifting of sanctions under the nuclear deal, Iranian oil is only beginning to enter the world market in a big way.
Economists also derided Mr. Trump’s repeated calls for “energy independence” — a phrase commonly used by politicians to suggest that the United States could isolate itself from global energy markets, producing and consuming only what it needs.
Several economists pointed out that the best way to wean the nation from imported oil is to lower the dependence on oil over all, with policies designed to reduce oil demand.
Tom Kloza, the global head of energy analysis for the Oil Price Information Service, a research firm, pointed to Environmental Protection Agency regulations to increase vehicle fuel efficiency, which require automakers to build vehicles that travel farther on less gasoline.
“The oil supply side will take care of itself, through the market,” Mr. Kloza said. “The demand side is where progress can be made through policy. The best thing a president could do, given the market, would be to lower oil demand.”
He added, “I doubt if Trump understands that.”
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
5M BBLs/day doesn’t seem like energy independence to me.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mttntus2&f=m