Trump’s energy juggernaut faces a more daunting Year 2 Legal challenges and market forces will have a lot to say about the success or failure of his pro-fossil-fuel agenda.
By BEN LEFEBVRE
| 01/23/2018 05:01 AM EST President Donald Trump has resurrected the Keystone XL pipeline, renounced the Paris climate agreement, opened a long-disputed Alaska refuge to oil drilling and ordered his agencies to erase Obama-era regulations on the petroleum, coal and power industries — all in the name of asserting U.S. “energy dominance.â€
But from here on, his victories will become harder to achieve.
Reversing Barack Obama’s environmental and energy agenda is one of the Trump administration’s big first-year successes, alongside achievements like December’s $1.5 trillion tax overhaul. It has certainly been one of Trump's most persistent strategies, as his agencies have moved to revoke Obama’s climate and water regulations, ease limits on fracking, wipe out drilling restrictions on almost the entire U.S. coastline and postpone energy-efficiency requirements.
Now, however, the courts will have their say in how far these rollbacks go, as much of Trump’s deregulatory agenda faces legal challenges from state attorneys general and environmental groups stretching from D.C. to California.
More seriously, the parts of Trump’s agenda that survive may not have the deep impact that he is promising — especially as the nation moves into the second decade of a boom that has already made the U.S. the world's biggest oil and gas producer, and as market forces continue to take a bite out of coal.
“We already seem to have more oil than we can say grace over,†said John Northington, a former Clinton-era Interior Department official now working as an energy consultant. “I don’t think the new policies will have any impact on the market. A lot of the rulemaking they’ve proposed will be held up in courts or overturned.â€
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https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/23/trump-energy-pipeline-drilling-paris-climate-353585
