Donald
Trump really is going to make America great again. It wasn’t just a campaign
slogan: Trump is for real—and one of the great pleasures in the coming
years is going to be the joy of watching all those pundits who think he’s going
to be a disaster being proved wrong again and again.
Nowhere
will this be more evident than in his policies on energy and the environment.
As you know, I made a trip
to Washington, D.C. just before Christmas to check out the lie of the
land. What I wanted to find out was just how serious Trump is about slaying
the Green Blob which
has caused so much misery and expense in the U.S. and across the world for the
last thirty or forty years. And after a series of private briefings with
administration insiders and members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, I came
back heartened.
Here’s how
one of them put it:
“Trump
is going to send his tanks into the swamp from Day One. He knows there
isn’t time to lose and he knows that every day that passes those tanks are
going to get sucked deeper into the slime…” [by ‘the slime’ my anonymous
informant meant, of course, the liberal/DC establishment which will do
everything in its power to frustrate Trump] “…We’re going to go in fast and
we’re going to go in hard. They won’t know what hit them.”
And let’s
make something clear to all those ‘sensible’ conservatives—the centrist
squishes who supported #NeverTrump and who will insist, even now, on telling us
how uncomfortable they feel about the new regime, as though having a left-wing,
establishment crook like Hillary would have been preferable—Trump is the ONLY
Republican candidate who would have made this stuff happen.
Compare and
contrast what would have happened if a “safe” GOP candidate like Jeb Bush
was now on his way to the White House.
During the
presidential campaigns, Jeb Bush was asked what his policy on the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) would be if he got elected: “I’ll hire the best people.
And I’ll do the right thing,” he said.
In other
words, Jeb Bush would have done precisely zilch to rein in one of the most
destructive, overbearing and uncontrollable agencies within the U.S.
government.
Trump is
different because, unlike his mainstream GOP former rivals he feels absolutely
no need to compromise or to green virtue-signal. He has never made any
bones about his conviction that “climate change” is a con and that the US
economy has been held hostage by eco-loons and that blue-collar Americans
have been denied jobs because of the environmental policies imposed on them by
uptown pajama boys.
So what are
his plans for energy and the environment?
Well in fact, it’s no
secret. He set them out very clearly in the speech he
gave on May 26, 2016 in North Dakota.
Here is my 100-day action plan:
- We’re
going to rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions including
the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule.
- We’re
going to save the coal industry and other industries threatened by Hillary
Clinton’s extremist agenda.
- I’m
going to ask Trans Canada to renew its permit application for the Keystone
Pipeline.
- We’re
going to lift moratoriums on energy production in federal areas
- We’re
going to revoke policies that impose unwarranted restrictions on new
drilling technologies. These technologies create millions of jobs with a
smaller footprint than ever before.
- We’re
going to cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S.
tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.
- Any
regulation that is outdated, unnecessary, bad for workers, or contrary to
the national interest will be scrapped. We will also
eliminate duplication, provide regulatory certainty, and trust local officials
and local residents.
- Any
future regulation will go through a simple test: is this regulation good
for the American worker? If it doesn’t pass this test, the rule will not
be approved.
What’s so
brilliant about this—and why Trump’s critics underestimate him at their
peril—is that it expresses more clearly than any leading conservative
politician has ever done before that environmentalism is essentially an
attack on jobs and growth.
At one
point, it states it more explicitly still:
Here’s what
it comes down to.
Wealth
versus poverty.
And:
It’s a
choice between sharing in this great energy wealth, or sharing in the poverty
promised by Hillary Clinton.
Trump gets
it in a way that more “sophisticated” conservative leaders have failed to do
for four decades: greens are the enemies of prosperity; they are most
especially the enemies of people like the non-liberal Americans who live
outside the big cities.
“Democrats
have been waging a war on rural Americans for years. And the Bushes didn’t do a
damn thing to help them. Trump actually promised he would do something and the
voters got that. These are his people and he gets the problem,” says one of my
informants.
“If you dig
up stuff, if you make stuff, if you grow stuff then for the first time since
Reagan you have a president who has actually got your back.”
More
details to follow in the next in my series on Trump Versus The Green Blob. But
basically the news is good: the Trump presidency will mark a turning point in
global energy policy and in our attitude to the environment in general and
policies like renewables in particular. One thing we can confidently predict in
the next few years is that the Greenies are in for a world of pain and
disappointment. And it really couldn’t happen to a bunch of more deserving people.