Donald Trump claimed he would be an excellent president because he was a businessman, and his acolytes have echoed that notion ever since. But most successful businesses have to look ahead, not in the rearview mirror. Joseph Schumpeter famously said capitalism was a game of creative destruction: investment shifts from the obsolete to the cutting edge. But Trump, like Cher, wants to turn back time.
Case in point: he has set out to dismantle fifty years of progress on environmental protection and a start toward a shift toward energy that won’t change the climate in ways harmful to life on earth.
Not only is Trump’s reversal of direction bad policy, it’s based on willful ignorance of the facts in order to pander to a few constituents. And even some of those have seen the writing on the wall. For example, Trump signed some of his orders reversing Obama strictures flanked by a dozen or so coal miners. In fact, most of them realize their livelihood is on life support, regardless of Trump’s backward looking policies. Their boss certainly does.
In the same week that Trump was boasting that he’d bring back jobs in coal, “clean coal, really clean coal,” the head of Murray Energy, the nation’s largest coal producer, welcomed the end of Obama’s clean energy rules but warned that no matter what Trump did to dirty up the planet coal jobs wouldn’t be coming back. For decades automation has steadily reduced the number of miners needed.
And the fracking revolution means that coal has ceased to be competitive. A clean coal plant in Mississippi designed to capture carbon dioxide is years behind schedule and entailed massive coat overruns pushing the bill from $2.88 billion to $7 billion.
And in the meantime the falling price of natural gas has made it more expensive to operate than gas-fired plants. It has cost the Southern Company that built it billions in write downs. The first of it’s kind plant may also be the last.
Thus, Trump has sought to save a few thousand coal jobs at the expense of allowing climate change to proceed, a process that imperils hundreds of millions of lives, as well as food species the rest of us depend on for sustenance.
And he is increasingly alone in his retrograde position. ExxonMobil, for years a leading fossil fuel villain and climate change denier, has been forced to face reality. It’s CEO says “climate risks warrant action” and says the Paris accords are “an effective framework” for addressing the threat posed by carbon emissions.
He is not alone. The CEO of General Electric said efforts to reduce emissions and use cleaner fuels are needed, and the crisis “should be addressed on a global basis through multinational agreements” — like Paris. Duke Power is investing $1 billion over ten years in natural gas and renewables to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 35%, Southern Co. is investing $5 billion in wind farms to shift more production away from coal.
Part of this shift in attitude by energy companies is a result of their finding themselves under pressure, according to the Wall Street Journal, from stock investors at pension funds and university endowments who refuse to put money in businesses that cause climate change to worsen.
Apparently climate change denial has been recognized as bad business by everyone except Trump and the lunatic fringe from whose websites he gets his information. It’s too bad he doesn’t listen to his own EPA, Defense and Energy department scientists who could set him straight. Instead, employees at the Department of Energy and State have been ordered “not to use the words ‘climate change,’ ‘emissions reduction’ or ‘Paris Agreement’ in written memos, briefings or other written communications,” according to Politico.
Is this some sort of primitive taboo or Orwellian Newspeak? In either case, refusing to speak its name does not make climate change go away. Nor do conservative complaints that policies that favor clean energy distort markets. All government actions have market impact. The only question is, whose ox is gored? Deductions for mortgage payments distort the housing market. Student loans distort the education market. Conservatives have never complained about tax policies that favored fossil fuels or that favored automobiles and roads over mass transit and rails.
And as to spending money to pioneer a cleaner economy, everything costs money before it makes money. Investment in R&D may not pay dividends for years. Often that’s why government is the investor of first resort. Without government financing and research we wouldn’t have nuclear power, cell phones, the internet, GPS and a long, long list of improvement to the life we live.
Trump, Pruitt and the rest of his climate denier cabal are on the wrong side of history and Obama’s promotion of renewable energy was on the right side. Life is going to get lonelier for the dinosaurs as the climate continues to change and reality bites.