Trump’s Assault on the Environment Won’t Last
I spoke earlier today with a colleague whose renewable energy program in China just got derailed by Trump’s tariffs/nascent trade war; for that reason, he was understandably quite upset with the president. Uncharacteristically, I tried to mollify him about the current administration with these words:
A) This administration will be gone soon–all the Rick Perrys, the Scott Pruitts, the entirety of the legal onslaught against the environmental protections we have put in place over the last half century. And when it goes away, a new government can turn most of this around fairly quickly.
B) Trump is finding, much to his chagrin, that he’s not the king of the U.S. Yes, our president is a despicable human being, but that doesn’t mean that Congress has completely lost its mind. According to the current budget, ARPA-e, which the President wanted to eliminate, gets $353.3 million, and the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) receives $2.32 billion.
Let’s not get too down about all this; it could be worse, and it will all be over soon.
Craig,
Amazing as it may seem, the President is actually gaining in the polls.
Why or how can a renewable energy program in China, get derailed by US trade policies ?
Oh, if only the nasty man living in the large house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would go away all your nightmares would be solved overnight.
America could be as successful as Germany with renewable energy. Energiewende fur Amerika !
Except, like the Paris Accord, Energiewende is a huge and very expensive failure ! German energy costs have risen dramatically, emission targets missed and Germany is increasingly reliant reliant on imported fossil fuel energy including burning more brown coal.
In 2017, Germany imported 63.7 million tonnes of of hard coal consumed to augment the 255 million tonnes of lignite coal mined in Germany. Germany’s leading coal imports are Russia (32.2 %), Columbia (19.4%), and a growing amount from the United States (19.5%).
Now here’s a curious fact, Germany and the EU are spending vast sums increasing Natural Gas and Oil pipeline infrastructure from Norway and Russia, yet I don’t hear you complaining about the evils of European pipelines ?.
Germany is currently torn between those who still believe in immediately ending coal dependency by increasing NG imports (new pipelines), and those who have done the math and realize the German economy couldn’t sustain the cost.
Since Germany is main financial guarantee of the EURO, I glad the UK is existing a rapidly disintegrating EU.
Craig,
Interesting excerpt from Kieth Williamson writing in the Atlantic Magazine
” Senator Rand Paul is a man out of time. It was only a few years ago that the editors of Reason magazine held him up as the personification of what they imagined to be a “libertarian moment,” a term that enjoyed some momentary cachet in the pages of The New York Times, The Atlantic, Politico, etc.
The view from 2018 is rather different
If the Democrats were more clever, they might offer the libertarians a better deal on trade, criminal justice, and civil liberties. Instead, they are dreaming up excuses to sue or jail people for their views on climate change, and the United States is for the moment left with two authoritarian populist parties and no political home for classical liberalism at all.”