"We will build our own pipelines, like we used to in the old days." Thus spoke US president Donald Trump when he signed executive orders to permit construction of two highly contentious pipelines, one to transport oil from the Canadian tar sands in Alberta to US refineries on the Gulf coast and the other to take shale oil fracked in North Dakota to a trans-shipment point in Illinois.
The newly-inaugurated “leader of the free world” was referring to his insistence that these pipelines should be manufactured in the US, thereby creating thousands of temporary jobs for steel workers.
But in reversing former president Obama’s disapproval of the two pipeline projects, he is trying to turn back the clock by facilitating the further development of fossil fuels at a time when the world – including the US itself – is increasingly switching over to renewable energy sources that have never been cheaper than they are now.
President Trump is in Luddite mode. He has promised to restore jobs to “rust belt” workers in the steel and coal industries without apparently recognising their employment has been jeopardised more by automation than by the flight of American business to Asia or elsewhere. He has also peopled his cabinet with fossil fuel stalwarts, right-wing zealots committed to dismantling environmental legislation and climate change deniers of like mind to himself.
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Obama’s climate change action plan was peremptorily removed from the White House website within hours of Trump taking office and has been replaced by his “America First Energy Plan”, which includes only a passing reference to environmental protection. No doubt more of the same myopic irrationality will follow as the new president finds his feet.
However, as last weekend’s Women’s March on Washington showed, resistance to Trump is both widespread and growing. The long-established environment organisation, the Sierra Club, described his executive orders for the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines as “disgusting news” and pledged to “fight this tooth and nail”, going to court if necessary. Greenpeace in the US warned that the same “powerful alliance of indigenous communities, ranchers, farmers, and climate activists [that] stopped the Keystone and the Dakota Access pipelines the first time around . . . will come together to stop them again if Trump tries to raise them from the dead”. What the Trump administration needed to focus its efforts on instead was “the clean energy sector where America’s future lies”.
We are certainly living in interesting times when it has now fallen to China, run by a totalitarian regime, to champion free trade and the need to implement the Paris Agreement on Climate Change that came into force internationally a few days before Trump emerged as the winner of last November’s presidential election.