Donald Trump, Accidental Environmentalist |
Donald Trump, Accidental Environmentalist
By driving oil prices through the roof, he’s finally giving alternative energy some badly-needed stimulus. Too bad the economic benefit goes mainly to China.
Donald Trump calls climate change a “hoax,” a “scam,” and a “con job.” He has (twice) withdrawn the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, and he has pulled the plug, or tried to, on “the Green New Scam,” which is what he calls President Joe Biden’s extensive subsidies to alternative energy in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. (The Green New Deal, as Trump well knows, is a separate and never-enacted set of decarbonization policies advocated by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey.) Trump’s energy motto is “Drill, Baby, Drill”; he’s showered the petroleum industry with $80 billion in subsidies, and his Iran War is delivering sky-high windfall profits to the oil industry.
Nevertheless, through a combination of stubbornness, incompetence, and senility, Trump is inadvertently boosting the fortunes of alternative energy to a degree not seen since Biden was president. If he keeps this up, the Natural Resources Defense Council may have to erect a statue in his honor.
As I write, the international benchmark price of Brent crude is trading around $108.50 per barrel, and gasoline is priced, nationally, at an average $4.56 per gallon. In Washington, D.C., where I live, and where members of Congress in vulnerable districts have been known to gas up, the price is an even higher $4.67 per gallon. By attacking Iran, Trump prompted that nation’s ruling regime (very predictably)........