… under the Green New Deal, they don’t like clean, beautiful natural gas. They don’t like anything. They don’t know what they like. They sort of like wind, even though it kills all the birds. You want to see a bird cemetery? Go under a windmill sometime….
You know, in California, you go to jail for five years if you kill a bald eagle. If you go under a windmill, you see them all over the place.
– Donald Trump, “Remarks on Promoting Energy Infrastructure and Economic Growth,” Hackberry, Louisiana, May 14, 2019
Back in 1997, I published a long Policy Analysis for the Cato Institute, “Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not ‘Green’.” A section of that study, “The ‘Avian Mortality’ Problem,” addressed what President Trump recently said (above) 22 years later.
…“The golden era of American energy is now underway.” (President Donald Trump, The White House, May 14, 2019)
… under the Green New Deal, they don’t like clean, beautiful natural gas. They don’t like anything. (President Donald Trump, “Remarks on Promoting Energy Infrastructure and Economic Growth,” Hackberry, LA, May 14, 2019)
Who has been the most free-market energy President in U.S. history? In modern times, Ronald Reagan comes to mind. He decontrolled crude oil and petroleum products in his first week of office (January 1981), although Jimmy Carter’s phase-out of such regulation had just six months to go. Reagan did some other things to undo a decade of energy statism but fell short of his election goal of abolishing the US Department of Energy. [1]
Enter Donald Trump.
…By making federal certification more politicized, interstate natural-gas pipelines have had to spend additional money to defend their position, courts have become more burdened, and environmentalists have spent large sums of money…. These costs would seem to overwhelm any benefits: Demanding that FERC considers climate change is destined for failure.
The U.S. natural gas industry has enjoyed a great run over the past decades, continuing its stellar history upon the end of wellhead price controls several decades ago. The transition of interstate gas transmission to mandatory open access was also successful, freeing the commodity from public-utility regulation to introduce real-time scarcity pricing.
The natural gas sector has contributed greatly to the U.S. economy by creating quality jobs and reducing household and business energy bills on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars.
…