Learning from the debates

This past week, I examined Barack Obama's editorial in Science Magazine concerning his optimism about the future of renewable energy.  The White House has now changed hands.  As the Trump administration takes over, it is worth looking back at how Trump and his opponent Hillary Clinton addressed the issues of energy and global warming when they were asked about it in the debates.  In Trump’s case, it is useful to know what our President’s priorities are and what that means going forward.  In Clinton’s case, it is worth going back to see what she got right and what she got wrong, in order to understand what people who would challenge Trump need to know and say if they want to bring about the best possible energy future for this country and this planet.

Clinton, to her credit, introduced the subject of clean energy in the first debate during a general discourse on job creation.  She started talking about the United States’ potential role as a clean energy superpower, and then she mentioned Trump’s “Chinese hoax” quote regarding global warming.  Trump denied saying this, but the actual quote from Trump’s Twitter feed from November 6, 2012 says “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”  China remains the planet's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, but they have also just built the largest solar energy farm in the world.  They certainly take the notion of being a clean energy superpower very seriously. 

Trump responded by bringing up a government investment in a solar energy company that turned out to be “a disaster.”  The company he is referring to is called Solyndra.  Solyndra received a half billion dollar grant from the US government to develop solar panels made from copper indium gallium selenide, or CIGS.  This was part of President Obama’s “all of the above” approach to developing our energy infrastructure.  CIGS was seen as a potential alternative to silicon, which is the primary material used in solar panels.  Unfortunately for Solyndra, in the two years after receiving that grant, the price of silicon dropped by a factor of five.  Solyndra went bankrupt, but what needs to be said in no uncertain terms (and what should have been said by Clinton at the debate) is that the dramatic drop in the price of silicon was wonderful news for the solar industry as a whole, and it's a big reason why utility-scale solar is now fully cost-competitive with other sources of energy generation like coal and natural gas.

In the second debate, a private citizen asked an excellent question about energy policy.  Trump responded first, declaring our energy industry to be “under absolute siege” from the Obama Administration, and stating that the EPA was “killing these energy companies.”  The EPA did announce a Climate Action Plan in 2012; it went into effect in 2015, but its full implementation has been held up in court.  What has been the impact on the fossil fuels industry? Natural gas has seen a steady surge in production over the past decade that does not appear to have been affected by policy from Washington.  US oil production did peak in 2014, but it remains far higher than it was in 2010, and the United States is currently a net exporter of oil.  Coal production has been on a downward trend for close to a decade at this point.  While that trend does appear to have accelerated in the last two years, and the Climate Action Plan might have had an effect on it, it was instigated by the surge in natural gas production.  So some energy companies have been hurt in recent years, but that has actually had more to do with economics than politics.  And other energy companies have done quite well.

Trump also mentions “clean coal,” which involves adding a process in coal plants that removes carbon dioxide from the emissions.  Ironically, a state-of-the-art clean coal plant that also received support initially from the Obama Administration has, like Solyndra, to this point been a sunk cost for the government.  The difference is that Solyndra failed for reasons that were good for the solar industry as a whole, but making clean coal cost-effective has proven to be a difficult obstacle to overcome.  Coal, even without any additional burdens imposed for environmental reasons — burdens which, for the sake of the planet’s health, honestly need to be there — is struggling to compete economically with natural gas and now with renewables as well.  It’s important to be honest about that.

Trump’s answer gave Clinton plenty of opportunity to respond, but rather than going straight to the substance, she regrettably attacked Trump for using Chinese steel in his buildings.  She did mention that the United States is now energy independent, but given Trump’s emphasis on how policy was killing energy companies, she needed to be much more forceful on that point.  Clinton makes an interesting point about the Middle East controlling the price of oil.  I don't believe that's as true now as it was in the past, given the United States’ present state of energy independence.  However, the OPEC nations have until recently maintained production of oil at a high rate even as American production has surged, and that has helped to keep oil prices down. The OPEC nations agreed in November to lower production, though, and other oil producing countries including Russia agreed to follow suit in December.  The United States has yet to commit on this issue.  Given that Rex Tillerson, the Exxon executive who Trump nominated to be Secretary of State, has had a business relationship with Vladimir Putin in the past, it seems likely that we won't aggressively undercut Russia.  On the other hand, were Trump to go along with decreasing oil production, he’d have no way of deflecting responsibility for the ensuing spike in gas prices.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Clinton concludes her answer by again emphasizing America’s potential role as a clean energy superpower, while also warning against leaving people behind if they lose their jobs as the economy changes.  What she needed to do here, which Obama did in his editorial last week, was cite the US Department of Energy’s Energy and Employment Report.  Both the 2016 and 2017 editions indicate that the solar industry in America is currently employing more people than the coal industry, and Clinton really needed to hammer that point home.

So what do the pre-election debates say about the state of American energy post-inauguration?  For starters, it’s a given that Trump will undo restrictions and regulations on the fossil fuel industry as a whole.  The natural gas industry was doing just fine anyway, and barring a breakthrough in efficiency or storage technology that would unequivocally tilt the economic scales in favor of renewables, it will continue to do so.  A general rise in the price of oil might improve the profit margins in that industry, but Trump shouldn’t expect a bump in his approval ratings from that.  Coal is struggling for economic reasons and will continue to do so.  People who would tout renewables, and particularly solar energy, need to talk about what Solyndra's failure really meant, and trumpet the job creation that the surging industry is already providing.  Clinton allowed some of Trump’s inaccurate narratives to go unchecked, and failing to respond promptly and effectively to them turned out to be a luxury she couldn’t afford.

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