As America makes the transition from Obama to Trump today, for those who missed the speech I have a couple alternatives you can view.
First, a Dark Knight Rises version:
And then more of a Kenny Powers version:
Here come some interesting times to live in.
Trump’s presidency could have significant consequences for the Bay Area and California at large. Tune in tonight at 7pm on City Visions, KALW 91.7 FM as I host a discussion on how Trump’s actions in his first 100 days could impact our state’s residents, on issues including the environment, immigration, health care, and more.
My guests will include:
- David Campos, attorney and member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisor’s since 2008 representing District 9
- Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean and Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, with a join appointment in Political Science
- Jared Huffman, Democratic Congressman since 2013 representing California’s second district
For those outside of the Bay Area, you can stream the broadcast here. Hope you can tune in!
It’s been a guessing game since Election Day about what Trump will do on climate change and renewable energy. Some renewable advocates believe the bipartisan support for solar and wind will inoculate current federal tax credits from getting rolled back. Others believe that the tax credits will be vulnerable in the event of a big congressional overhaul of the tax code. Meanwhile, Trump has surrounded himself with climate science deniers and oil-and-gas tycoons.
But one “clean” energy technology might get favored treatment: nuclear fusion.
Why? One of Trump’s most ardent backers, Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire, is a big proponent and investor, as Bloomberg News reports:
Nuclear fusion, which would harness the power of the sun without all the nasty byproducts, is a long-shot—politically, financially, and technologically. Despite relative ambivalence toward fusion by the Obama administration, research has continued apace internationally, and in the American public and private sector. At the head of this pack are venture capitalists like Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention and is said to be working on the Trump transition team. He has funded a fusion start-up called Helion Energy through his Mithril Capital Management to pursue the ultimate dream of environmentalists the world over.
Fusion has sounded interesting on paper but has never materialized as a practical option. Of course, solar panels used to be prohibitively expensive and impractical until government incentives and pro-manufacturing policies spurred the necessary investment to bring costs down. Thiel’s company is hoping for the same dynamic with fusion:
Helion hopes to make a fusion generator that’s 1,000 times smaller, 500 times cheaper, and 10 times faster than more conventional, massive projects, according to its website. The company is building a “magneto-inertial fusion” generator. It produces power by injecting heated hydrogen and helium at high speed (a million miles an hour) into a “burn chamber,” where a strong magnetic field compresses the plasma to a temperature high enough to initiate fusion. Energy from the reaction is used to generate electricity.
Meanwhile, a potential ally, pro-nuclear environmentalist Ted Nordhaus, is causing a stir with a post arguing that the clean energy industry shouldn’t rush to deal with the Trump Administration given its authoritarian leanings, even if it pursues policies in their interests:
Trump campaigned and won the election fair and square. He has every right to pursue his agenda and vision for the country. When and if it becomes clear that democratic norms will prevail in the new Administration, that Trump does not intend to prosecute his political opponents, squelch dissent, and harass the free press, I will happily praise the Administration when it takes actions that I believe to be consistent with health, prosperity, equity, and environmental protection, and criticize it when it does not.
But the signals have thus far been mixed and that presents complicated decisions for those of us in think tanks, advocacy organizations, and the media. Most of our professional incentives are to act as if some version of normal democratic discourse and policy-making will prevail. There is not much for us to do, at least in the normal way that advocates advocate and analysts analyze, in the event that those norms do not prevail. The risk for all of us is that in our haste to get back to normal politics and advocacy, we normalize a dangerous turn toward authoritarianism.
Lots to chew on for an industry (one of many) now facing complicated and challenging times.
This might sound crazy, but Donald Trump’s presidency could actually have a temporarily positive impact on climate change. How? Nothing reduces emissions like a recession, and according to economists, Trump’s stated policies are likely to cause one.
Specifically, if Trump follows through on his promise to start a trade war with countries like China, he could end up reducing the U.S. carbon footprint significantly. Imagine higher tariffs on goods from China, U.S. cars manufactured in Mexico, and stuff from the myriad other places that export items we buy. The result will be higher prices on those goods, which will mean less consumption. Less consumption means fewer carbon emissions.
Then think of the result on those producing countries. We could see a slowdown in the economy of places like China, where growth is in large part due to sales of cheap stuff to the U.S. market. Because China itself is now a major emitter of greenhouse gases, a slowdown there will also reduce global emissions.
This isn’t just theoretical: we have experience on this issue from the Great Recession. That slowdown caused a dip in the nation’s carbon footprint, according to a UC Irvine study. The recession also made it easier for California to meet its 2020 emissions goals, as E&E News reported:
“California had a pretty soft economy for many years after its goal was set,” said Severin Borenstein, an economics professor at UC Berkeley and a member of a committee that the California Air Resources Board (ARB) set up in 2012-13 to advise it on the design of its cap-and-trade market. “Although it’s heating up now, we will easily make the 2020 goal, and that will in large part be due to the weak economy for many years.”
Now to be clear, an economic downturn is not something to root for, and it would cause all sorts of hardship and potentially more political instability. To avoid that outcome, California regulators have been meticulous and careful about making the transition to a clean economy without shocking the economy. Indeed, the state is instead focused on ways to benefit economically from clean technology, contrary to the usual conservative complaints about environmental action costing jobs and economic growth.
But Trump’s policies on trade, immigration and other economic issues may lead us to a recession regardless of what California does. And if that happens, the one silver lining for those concerned about climate change is that it will likely offer a temporary pause to the emission of heat-trapping gases. And that could buy the world more time to emerge from a post-Trump era with still a fighting chance to limit climate change.
Last night’s presidential debate was a real low for American democracy, with the audience cheering Donald Trump’s threat to jail his political opponent, Hillary Clinton, once he’s elected. Members of the media seemed to highlight the shocking claim almost in passing, perhaps because they don’t quite realize that they’d be next in jail.
But aside from these chilling words, there was actually a bit of substantive discussion in the debate, too. The second-to-last question on energy policy in particular caught my attention. Trump answered first, and Grist helpfully broke down the amazing amount of falsehoods in his reply:
• Trump: “[E]nergy is under siege by the Obama administration. … We are killing, absolutely killing, our energy business in this country.”
In fact: Total U.S. energy production has increased for the last six years in a row. The oil and gas sector has been booming during the Obama presidency, as have the solar and wind industries. Coal companies have been struggling — but that is largely not the fault of President Obama, just as the oil boom is largely not something he can take credit for.
• Trump: “I will bring our energy companies back. … They will make money. They will pay off our national debt. They will pay off our tremendous budget deficits.”
In fact: There is no remotely credible economic analysis to suggest that Trump’s proposals for expanded domestic fossil fuel extraction would generate enough additional tax revenue to close the budget deficit, much less pay off the existing national debt. It’s particularly implausible when you consider Trump’s massive tax-cut plans that would make both the deficit and debt considerably larger.
• Trump: “I’m all for alternative forms of energy, including wind, including solar, etc.”
In fact: Trump’s energy plan offers nothing to increase solar or wind energy production, but instead focuses on boosting fossil fuels.
• Trump: “There is a thing called clean coal.”
In fact: The hope that coal plants’ carbon emissions can be drastically reduced — either through technology that captures and sequesters the emissions or that converts coal to synthetic gas — burns eternal for the coal industry’s cheerleaders. But no one has actually significantly cut emissions at an economically viable coal plant. The promises of “clean coal” projects have not been fulfilled.
• Trump: “Foreign companies are now coming in and buying so many of our different plants, and then rejiggering the plant so they can take care of their oil.”
In fact: What is Trump trying to say with this gibberish? We have no idea.
But lest we automatically assume Clinton’s answer pleased the environmental community, she made two comments that raised some hackles. First, she described natural gas as a “bridge” to cleaner fuels, which many environmentalists dispute due to the methane and other emissions involved. Second, she described the United States as “energy independent” when we’re still a net importer of crude oil and petroleum.
Still, the candidates are miles apart on this issue, as my colleague Dan Farber describes on Legal Planet, with Clinton the only real choice for those who care about the environment.
This is not a typical election with the usual policy disagreements among the candidates. Instead, it’s a race between two major party candidates with vastly different levels of respect for our American democracy and values. We shouldn’t overlook that fundamental difference, but we should also still use the occasion to talk about important issues like energy — and note the stark differences among the candidates’ views.
It’s a cautionary tale about experts and the perils of group-think. Here’s Rep. Keith Ellison getting laughed at back in July 2015:
And here’s Ann Coulter facing ridicule from Bill Maher’s Real Time audience and panel back in August:
Honorable mention for predictive accuracy: Paul Krugman in August.
Trump has made no secret of his rejection of climate science. Instead, he counter-punches by saying the real threat is global warming caused by a nuclear bomb (video above), as Politico reports:
The seemingly far-fetched threat of nuclear-induced climate change has been on Trump’s mind since at least June, when he warned of “nuclear warming” during a visit to The Chicago Tribune. His concern: The environmental impact of a potential nuclear blast gets far less attention than the greenhouse gas emissions that are already raising sea levels and temperatures worldwide.
What’s his solution? Trump’s underlying policy goal here is actually dismissing calls for federal action to cut U.S. emissions by raising the profile at a presidential level of both national security and nuclear containment. It’s a counter-argument as well to both Obama and Clinton, who have described climate change as a threat on par with terrorism.
It’s an odd way to deflect on the science and attempt instead to muddle the issue. But who knows — in this election year, it may actually work well enough to confuse people. And of course the other challenge for climate advocates is that climate change doesn’t rank high on the list of voter concerns.
It certainly doesn’t help when a major party nominee tosses out strange, deflecting rhetoric like this, but it’s a line of argument that advocates should be ready to refute.
Rev. Jesse Jackson backs Trump on one issue at least
Donald Trump has become the Republican nominee in part through divisive and hateful rhetoric. So it’s somewhat ironic that he and Jesse Jackson, the iconic civil rights leaders, agree on at least one important topic: the need for infrastructure investment at home, instead of nation building abroad.
As Rev. Jackson wrote in a recent column on the Flint water crisis:
This country continues to squander billions on failed “nation building” efforts on the other side of the world. We wasted over $2 trillion on the debacle in Iraq that has helped destabilize the greater Middle East. As Flint has revealed, we will face spreading calamities from obsolete water systems, dangerous bridges, crumbling roads, dated and insufficient mass transit. It is time we stop pretending we can police the world and start rebuilding our country here at home.
Compare that with Trump’s argument in the Washington Post about what’s ailing America’s inner cities:
And I just think we have to rebuild our country. If you look at the infrastructure — I just landed at an airport where, not in good shape, not in good shape. If you go to Qatar and if you go to (inaudible) you see airports the likes of which you have never seen before. Dubai, different places in China. You see infrastructure, you see airports, other things, the likes of which you have never seen here.
…
We have a country that is in bad shape, it’s in bad condition. You look at our inner cities, our inner cities are a horrible mess. I watched Baltimore, I have many, many friends in Baltimore, we watched what happened. St. Louis, Ferguson, Oakland, it could have been much worse over the summer. And it will probably be worse this summer. But you look at some of our inner cities. And yet you know I watched as we built schools in Iraq and they’d be blown up. And we’d build another one and it would get blown up. And we would rebuild it three times. And yet we can’t build a school in Brooklyn. We have no money for education, because we can’t build in our own country. And at what point do you say hey, we have to take care of ourselves. So, you know, I know the outer world exists and I’ll be very cognizant of that but at the same time, our country is disintegrating, large sections of it, especially in the inner cities.
And in an earlier interview with the Guardian, Trump expressed support for investing in mass transit.
Now I’m sure Jackson and Trump won’t agree on much else. But on such an important issue, it’s pretty amazing to see this convergence from such polar-opposite leaders.
Last month I summarized Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s views on various environmental issues. Since then, the candidate completed an environmental and energy questionnaire from the Koch-supported American Energy Alliance that sheds further light on his thinking, or at least where his thinking isn’t.
One thing that stood out is that he seems to have backed away from his desire to completely eliminate the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Instead, he wants more scrutiny:
Under my administration, all EPA rules will be reviewed. Any regulation that imposes undue costs on business enterprises will be eliminated.
Of course, EPA rulemaking already is required to take into account cost-benefit analyses in its major rules, but Trump answered affirmatively in the questionnaire that agencies have abused this analysis in order to give themselves more regulatory power.
On energy, he takes a position that may actually hurt the oil and gas industry:
Subsidies distort markets and should be used only when national security is at stake. Eventually, all subsidies should end so that the demand for energy will set prices, allow consumers access to the best values and encourage all facets of the energy industry to do all they can to keep their particular source competitive.
Ironically, the oil and gas industry receive significant subsidies from government, possibly close to $40 billion or more per year by some estimates. I’ve often thought of ending these subsidies as a sort of “dormant carbon tax,” because they could potentially raise the cost of oil and gas the way a carbon tax would.
But Trump seems to contradict himself somewhat in the next answer, where he says he favors subsidies if it means “energy independence.” He thinks that urgent need means “we must support all energy sources.” By that logic, he may be persuadable to support renewable energy and electric vehicles, although he rules out support for a carbon tax, which would be the most efficient way to boost energy independence and those clean technologies.
Trump also supports the renewable fuel standard (RFS) for the energy independence reason (although I’m sure Iowa politics played a role). He wants the RFS program to continue, although environmentalists don’t like the mandate because it doesn’t have an environmental screen on what fuel is produced. But that policy is actually an important backstop for California’s low-carbon fuel standard, which does have that screen (not that it’s a reason to keep the federal program as-is).
Trump went on to give muddled and confused answers on what the U.S. government should do with the federal land it owns (establish “a shared governance structure” with states) and on clean water (it’s the “responsibility of all citizens and governments” and “shared governance of waterways seems a logical way to go”).
Overall, a bit more of a window into the candidate’s thinking on issues. But these bits and pieces are all we’re likely to get at this point, given how little substance is on his website on environmental topics.
Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for President, so it’s worth looking at his views on the environment. And from the perspective of environmental protection, they are not promising, to say the least.
For starters, Mr. Trump would like to eliminate the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which would mean undoing federal protections for clean air and water and devolving that authority to states. It’s unclear then how states would manage interstate pollution problems. It would also mean the United States would no longer be able to uphold much of its international Paris commitments to reduce greenhouse gases: US negotiators relied on EPA’s Clean Power Plan and its effect of reducing emissions from the electricity sector to meet our country’s commitments under the accord. Of course, the plan is under judicial attack anyway, but eliminating EPA destroys the institution that would administer and enforce it.
On energy, he doesn’t seem to be a fan of renewables, although he doesn’t discuss this issue much in public. But he once sued to stop wind turbines going in near his Scotland real estate project and complained back in 2012 that solar panels are not economical. Meanwhile, he’s a big fan of fracking. And he not only supported the Keystone XL pipeline, he’s an investor in one of the companies that would have built it.
On climate change, he does not accept the scientific consensus, per his recent exchange with the Washington Post editorial board:
I think there’s a change in weather. I am not a great believer in man-made climate change. I’m not a great believer. There is certainly a change in weather that goes – if you look, they had global cooling in the 1920s and now they have global warming, although now they don’t know if they have global warming. They call it all sorts of different things; now they’re using “extreme weather” I guess more than any other phrase. I am not – I know it hurts me with this room, and I know it’s probably a killer with this room – but I am not a believer. Perhaps there’s a minor effect, but I’m not a big believer in man-made climate change.
But there is a potential positive that a President Trump would bring for the environment: namely, his views on infrastructure spending and mass transit investment:
We have to spend money on mass transit. We have to fix our airports, fix our roads also in addition to mass transit, but we have to spend a lot of money.
He’s also — amazingly for a Republican — spoken out in favor of Obama’s priority of high speed rail deployment:
You go to China they have trains that go 300 miles per hours and our just go chug, chug, chug and then they have to stop because the track split. We’re like the third world.
These views appear to spring from his background as a real estate developer who likes to build stuff (not just a wall with Mexico). But it also may come from his non-interventionist foreign policy, where he decries “nation building” overseas while our cities crumble from the lack of infrastructure investment:
And I just think we have to rebuild our country. If you look at the infrastructure — I just landed at an airport where, not in good shape, not in good shape. If you go to Qatar and if you go to (inaudible) you see airports the likes of which you have never seen before. Dubai, different places in China. You see infrastructure, you see airports, other things, the likes of which you have never seen here.
…
We have a country that is in bad shape, it’s in bad condition. You look at our inner cities, our inner cities are a horrible mess. I watched Baltimore, I have many, many friends in Baltimore, we watched what happened. St. Louis, Ferguson, Oakland, it could have been much worse over the summer. And it will probably be worse this summer. But you look at some of our inner cities. And yet you know I watched as we built schools in Iraq and they’d be blown up. And we’d build another one and it would get blown up. And we would rebuild it three times. And yet we can’t build a school in Brooklyn. We have no money for education, because we can’t build in our own country. And at what point do you say hey, we have to take care of ourselves. So, you know, I know the outer world exists and I’ll be very cognizant of that but at the same time, our country is disintegrating, large sections of it, especially in the inner cities.
So if Donald Trump becomes president, we could actually see more mass transit, high speed rail, tall Trump-like buildings in our downtowns, and rebuilt inner cities. And whether he believes in it or not, this kind of downtown, transit-oriented development is one of the best ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
It’s about the only bright spot in what is otherwise a dismal set of views on environmental protection.
