The media has done its best to ignore a speech on energy recently given by Donald Trump. Mr. Trump campaign pledge: “From an environmental standpoint, my priorities are very simple: clean air and clean water.” (Not climate change!)
Holman Jenkins in the WSJ writes about Donald Trump’s “sensible energy plan.”
Mr. Trump, in his set-piece energy speech on Thursday, did something that might outlast his presidential hopes. In his anti-intellectual way, he made an intellectual contribution. For decades, poorly justified scientific fears of future warming have hovered as an incubus over U.S. energy development. These fears, you’ll notice, have not actually blocked much of anything: Fracking happened. The U.S. continues to export coal to China. But these fears fill America’s leadership class with guilt and cognitive dissonance.
As Mr. Jenkins notes, “Mr. Trump tweaked Hillary Clinton for promoting U.S. fracking technology to China as secretary of state, then proposing to regulate fracking out of existence at home. He tweaked President Obama for seeking to block Canada’s energy exports by killing the Keystone pipeline even while enabling Iran to open its spigots.”
