Trump Desperate To Expand Fossil Fuels–But Here’s Why He’s Failing

People say that Trump is so impetuous and unpredictable that he’s impossible to deal with.  That may be true in certain cases, but certainly not in his energy policy, which is extremely consistent; it’s all about bringing back jobs in dead-end technologies, while attempting to kill their competition, i.e., renewable energy.   It’s a lucky accident that, even with all that tenacity, this is a strategy doomed to failure.

What happened when Energy Secretary Rick Perry promoted his idea to subsidize coal-fired power plants on the basis that they store their fuel on-site?  It was rejected unanimously by FERC (the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), whose members were stunned that they were forced to consider an idea or utterly asinine and regressive.

A good argument can be made that it’s wrong for government to pick winners, i.e., that the market should decide what it wants.  But here’s a case that’s even more indefensible: a vigorous, tooth-and-nail fight to pick winners….that are actually obvious losers.

FWIW, this is why I haven’t written a fifth book: I have nothing to write about.  My last book (Bullish on Renewable Energy) is all about this precise phenomenon: renewable energy is steadily displacing fossil fuels, almost exclusively due the pressure of pure market economics, and there is nothing anyone or anything, regardless of how malicious in intent, can do about it.  The price of solar and wind, along with energy storage, continues to plummet, and there is no power on Earth that’s going to turn that around.

Here’s an article in Politico that makes this precise point.  It’s title says it all: “Trump’s failing war on green power — Wind and solar energy may have come too far for even a pro-fossil-fuel administration to stuff back into the barrel.”