Economy
Returning Trump To The White House Would Reverse Biden’s ‘Energy Ideocracy
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
With a second term for former President Donald Trump suddenly seeming far more likely in the wake of President Joe Biden’s shocking debate performance, the decision by a Louisiana federal judge Monday to place a hold on the Biden Energy Department’s bizarre “pause” on Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) permitting highlights a clear example of how energy policy would shift with a Trump win in November.
In rendering his decision, Federal District Judge James Cain, Jr. called the justifications for the paus offered by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and DOE staff “completely without reason or logic and is perhaps the epiphany of ideocracy.”
Oof. Of course, that is pretty much what I wrote here about it back in February after the policy was put in place, though I did leave out the part about “ideocracy.”
Simply put, a second Trump presidency would put a quick end to interventionist efforts by the federal government to pick winners and losers in the energy space. Such ideocratic efforts have throughout history most often created unintended consequences that do great damage to impacted industries and the overall economy.
Indeed, Biden’s ideocratic efforts to force adoption of electric vehicles on an increasingly reluctant American public are already doing great damage to the domestic auto industry.
Last month, Fisker became the latest in a succession of pure-play EV makers to go into bankruptcy. Peer company Rivian was teetering on the brink of having to make a similar move before it was bailed out by angel investor Volkswagen’s pledge to pour $5 billion of new capital into its operations in the coming years.
Ford Motor Company has struggled in its own efforts to mount a successful line of EVs, reporting billions of dollars in losses in the process. Investor pressures became so intense after the company lost $132,000 on every unit sold in Q1 2024 that management announced a move to delay and cancel billions in planned additional EV investments in favor of shifting focus to hybrid cars instead.
Biden’s and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s similarly ideocratic efforts to subsidize massive wind developments off the North Atlantic shores of New England have predictably produced similarly damaging results. A parade of planned projects by major wind developers like Equinor, Orsted, and BP have been cancelled as Biden-induced inflation caused their costs to mushroom. A few have been renewed, but with renegotiated power supply rates that will cause utility customers’ bills to explode. Add to that the fact that at least 98 marine mammals — some listed as endangered species — have washed up dead on the beaches of New Jersey alone as wind development has ramped up. You can also add ecological disaster to the economic damage related to this ideocratic pursuit.
Economic and other displacements related to Biden’s ideocratic subsidies for wind and solar industrial installations onshore have become so noticeable and impactful that they are now being opposed in local communities all over the country, with many being rejected outright. Energy Analyst Robert Bryce keeps an excellent comprehensive database of these rejections at his own website.
Even with the local pushback, though, many more proposed wind and solar sites have been approved and developed while benefitting from an array of federal and state subsidies and tax incentives. Unfortunately, the flooding of power grids in Texas and across the rest of the country with unpredictable intermittent generation has had the ideocratic impact of dramatically reducing the stability and reliability of electricity service across the country.
The simple truth is that, in describing the Biden/Granholm LNG permitting pause as “perhaps the epiphany of ideocracy,” Judge Cain could have just as well have been describing the entirety of the administration’s energy policies.
I am asked every day by friends, family and readers alike what changes a second Trump administration would bring to energy policy. It is a question I have always struggled to answer in 50 words or less.
But now, thanks to Judge Cain, I will have a ready answer: “Trump would reverse Biden’s energy ideocracy.”
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Featured Image Credit: Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz
Dale Swampy, founder of the National Coalition of Chiefs. Photograph for Canadian Energy Centre
From the Canadian Energy Centre
National Coalition of Chiefs founder Dale Swampy says Canada needs a more sustainable strategy for reducing emissions
The head of the National Coalition of Chiefs (NCC) says Ottawa’s proposed oil and gas emissions cap couldn’t come at a worse time for Indigenous communities.
Dale Swampy says the cap threatens the combined prospect of higher costs for fuel and groceries, along with fewer economic opportunities like jobs and revenues from involvement in energy projects.
“Any small fluctuation in the economy is affected on our communities tenfold because we rely so much on basic necessities. And those are going to be the products that increase in price significantly because of this,” says Swampy, who founded the NCC in 2016 to fight poverty through partnerships with the natural resource sector.
He says that of particular concern is the price of fuel, which will skyrocket under the emissions cap because it will force reduced Canadian oil and gas production.
Analysis by S&P Global found that meeting the cap’s requirements would require a production cut of over one million barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe/d) in 2030, and 2.1 million boe/d in 2035.
“Production gets reduced, and the cost of fuel goes up,” Swampy says.
“Our concern is that everything that has to do with both fuel for transportation and fuel to heat our homes is amplified on First Nation communities because we live in rural Canada. We live in isolated communities, and it costs much more for us to operate our daily lives because we have to travel much further than anybody in a metropolitan area. So, it’s going to impact us greatly.”
Indigenous communities are already stretched financially, he says.
“What you could buy in 2019 terms of meat and produce is almost double now, and even though the inflation rate is trending downwards, we still haven’t gotten over the impact of what it costs for a bag of groceries these days,” Swampy says.
“In our communities, more than half are under the age of 21, so there’s a lot of bigger families out there struggling to just get food on the table.”
The frustrating timing of the cap is that it comes amid a rising tide of Indigenous involvement in Canadian oil and gas. Since 2022, more than 75 Indigenous communities in Alberta and B.C. have agreed to become part owners of energy projects.
Three major projects – the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion, Coastal GasLink Pipeline and LNG Canada export terminal – together have spent more than $11 billion with Indigenous and local businesses.
“We’re at a turning point right now. There’s a real drive towards getting us involved in equity opportunities, employment opportunities, and contracting opportunities,” Swampy says.
“Everybody who didn’t talk to us in the past is coming to our front door and saying, ‘Do you want to work with us?’ It couldn’t come at a worse time when we have this opportunity. The emissions cap is going to reduce the amount of activity, and it’s going to reduce the amount of investment,” he says.
“We’re part of that industry now. We’re entrenched in it now, and we have to support it in order to support our people that work in this industry.”
Economic growth, and more time, is needed to fund development of low emissions energy sources without ruining the economy, he says.
“I think we need more consultation. We’d like to see them go back to the table and try to incorporate more of a sustainable strategy for emission reductions,” Swampy says.
“We’re the only country in the world that’s actually incorporating this type of legislation. Do you think the rest of the world is going to do this type of thing? No, they’re going to eat our lunch. They’re going to replace the production that we give up, they’re going to excel in the economy because of it, and they won’t talk about significant emission reduction initiatives.”
We’ve discussed the housing crisis before. That would include the destabilizing combination of housing availability – in particular a weak supply of new construction – and the immigration-driven population growth.
Parsing all the data can be fun, but we shouldn’t forget the human costs of the crisis. There’s the significant financial strain caused by rising ownership and rental costs, the stress so many experience when desperately searching for somewhere decent to live, and the pressure on businesses struggling to pay workers enough to survive in madly expensive cities.
If Canada doesn’t have the resources to house Canadians, should there be fewer of us?
Well we’ve also discussed the real problems caused by low fertility rates. As they’ve already discovered in low-immigration countries like Japan and South Korea, there’s the issue of who will care for the growing numbers of childless elderly. And who – as working-age populations sharply decline – will sign up for the jobs that are necessary to keep things running.
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The odds are that we’re only a decade or so behind Japan. Remember how a population’s replacement-level fertility rate is around 2.1 percent? Here’s how Canadian “fertility rates per female” have dropped since 1991:
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Put differently, Canada’s crude birth rate per 1,000 population dropped from 14.4 in 1991, to 8.8 in 2023.
As a nation, we face very difficult constraints.
But there’s another cost to our problems that’s both powerful and personal, and it exists at a place that overlaps both crises. A recent analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) frames it in terms of suppressed household formation.
Household formation happens when two more more people choose to share a home. As I’ve written previously, there are enormous economic benefits to such arrangements, and the more permanent and stable the better. There’s also plenty of evidence that children raised within stable families have statistically improved economic, educational, and social outcomes.
But if households can’t form, there won’t be a lot of children.
In fact, the PBO projects that population and housing availability numbers point to the suppression of nearly a half a million households in 2030. And that’s incorporating the government’s optimistic assumptions about their new Immigration Levels Plan (ILP) to reduce targets for both permanent and temporary residents. It also assumes that all 2.8 million non-permanent residents will leave the country when their visas expire. Things will be much worse if either of those assumptions doesn’t work out according to plan.
Think about a half a million suppressed households. That number represents the dreams and life’s goals of at least a million people. Hundreds of thousands of 30-somethings still living in their parents basements. Hundreds of thousands of stable, successful, and socially integrated families that will never exist.
And all that will be largely (although not exclusively) the result of dumb-as-dirt political decisions.
Who says policy doesn’t matter?
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