Trump Outlines ‘America First’ Energy Plan: Coal, Oil, Gas
May 26th, 2016Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
—
Ok. Well. Here we go.
Solar and wind are already cheaper in some markets than coal and they are just getting started.
Even in a place like New Zealand, with maximum hostility toward solar, the number of installations keep doubling. The same sort of doubling with solar is happening around the world. Doubling from next to nothing doesn’t amount to much at first. But anyone who knows the one about doubling pennies for a month wouldn’t bet against solar.
Maybe someone close to Trump could let him know about doubling pennies for a month… With this energy plan, he’s essentially choosing to take the million dollar payout up front instead of $10.7 million after 30 days.
Other stories of interest along these lines:
‘It’s the end of energy and transportation as we know it’ – Tony Seba
Solar: “Ignoring the Exponential Growth”
Wikipedia: Growth of Photovoltaics
Via: The Hill:
Donald Trump outlined an energy plan he’s calling “America First” on Thursday, using a speech in North Dakota to promote oil, natural gas and coal for the country’s future.
The presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s plan, which shares its name with his foreign policy platform, is as much about helping the fossil fuel sector as it is about fighting what he called “job-killing” policies from the Obama administration, which he says Democrat Hillary Clinton would only further as president.
It aligns closely with longstanding priorities of Republican policymakers and avoids forgoing GOP orthodoxy like the candidate has done in other policy areas.
“American energy dominance will be declared a strategic, economic and foreign policy goal of the United States,” Trump said in the speech at a petroleum conference in Bismarck, N.D. “It’s about time.”
He said the country needs to better use its fossil fuel stores, resources he said President Obama has locked away.
“We will become and stay totally independent of any need to import energy from the OPEC cartel or any nations hostile to our interests,” Trump said.
“At the same time, we will work with our [Persian] Gulf allies to develop a positive energy relationship as part of our anti-terrorism strategy,” he said of countries that supply oil to the United States. “We’ll work with them because we have to knock out terrorism.”
He said he’d allow far more oil, gas and coal extraction on federal land and offshore.
Trump’s speech was mostly scripted and read from a prompter, something he does rarely and usually only for policy-focused speeches.
He pledged to save the coal industry, though gave few specifics.
Trump said he would ask TransCanada Corp. to resubmit its application to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline through America’s central states. Obama rejected a permit for the pipeline in November, but Trump said he would approve it if the U.S. gets a share of the Canadian corporation’s profits in return.
“Why not? We’re making it possible. Let’s take a piece of the action for you folks, you know, lower your taxes a little bit more,” he said.
He also briefly mentioned alternative energy sources, like wind and solar power, but said they shouldn’t be promoted at the expense of “other forms of energy that right now are working much better.”
