The Energy Future We Could Have Had, If Only Trump Hadn't Trashed It
Oil, oil, oil. The war with Iran has oil prices soaring. And no thanks, President Trump, for your other war, the one against green energy.
As Americans freak over gas prices, they are taking another look at electric vehicles. But guess what? Most domestic automakers dropped ambitious investments toward that end, leaving car lots bereft of these gasoline-replacing vehicles, at least American-made ones.
It didn't have to be that way. Barack Obama and Joe Biden launched serious programs to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Trump trashed those ambitious plans to bring Americans into an electrified era that the rest of the civilized world was racing toward. Not only did he freeze what was a massive building of domestic EV factories, but he launched a war against the campaign to install charging stations across the country — facilities that would make EV ownership more attractive.
And so here we are, dancing around $100 for a barrel of Brent crude. And we're stuck.
Let's discard a few misconceptions peddled by the Trumpian fantasy of how this all works. First off, no one was pushing for the immediate end of oil production. Our policy was to meet the growing need for energy by throwing everything at it: the clean sources of wind, solar, hydropower, geothermal and tidal — plus oil and natural gas.
Falsehood No. 2 is that America doesn't produce enough oil to meet the country's demand. The United States exports more oil than it imports. In that respect, we are energy independent, and we've been that way since 2019.
But America's producing more natural gas and petroleum than it consumes does not do much to lower gasoline prices. Oil is priced in a global market.
Sure, Trump could order that all U.S.-produced crude oil must stay in the U.S., but his friends in America's oil industry wouldn't stand for it. They're now making a ton of money off the world price.
Bear in mind that after the 1970s energy shocks, there actually was a restriction on crude oil exports. It was lifted in 2015. And let me indelicately suggest that Trump has hobbled the shift to green energy to extract money from the fossil fuel industry.
Electric vehicles generally cost more upfront but far less to run. And the higher gas prices go, the sweeter the EV deal becomes. Yet Honda has scrapped plans to build three EV models in the United States. Ford, General Motors and Stellantis — the parent of Jeep and Chrysler — have likewise scaled back on domestic EV production.
And just last week, the Trump administration sued California over its high mileage standards for new vehicles. It's also suing the state to reclaim funds set aside for expanding the network of EV charging stations.
So far, I've said not a word about climate change, but there is no chaining me down. The original campaign for green energy reflected fears of a warming planet with the resulting floods, weather chaos and the destruction of the natural world as we know it.
Trump sold his masses on the supreme importance of the price of gas. He told us the price was going down when it was going up. The size of today's spike is such that he can no longer gaslight the public on the real price at the pump. And so now he's saying that it will go down, down, down when this war is over.
The tragedy is that the energy policies we could have had are the energy policies we did have. They ended when Trump turned on the American future. That future, sadly, is here.
Froma Harrop is an award winning journalist who covers politics, economics and culture. She has worked on the Reuters business desk, edited economics reports for The New York Times News Service and served on the Providence Journal editorial board.
Reprinted with permission from Creators.
