Guess whose energy policy now sounds MAGA? Rahm Emanuel’s – and Obama’s, too. – Wirepoints

By: Mark Glennon*

If you’ve been listening to Donald Trump’s views about the enormous opportunity in exploiting America’s fossil fuel deposits, you’d almost think a revolution bigger than the internet is at hand.

But you might be surprised at who actually said that: Rahm Emanuel, former Chicago Mayor and White House chief of staff during the Obama Administration. And it was Emanuel who was central to getting the Obama Administration to go along with the view that fossil fuels are so important to America.

“The biggest revolution equal to the Internet is the energy independence in the United States,” Emanuel said on CNBC in 2014.

Emanuel viewed cheap energy, largely from fracking, as a spark that would light an American manufacturing resurgence.  “Cheap energy—the revolution that’s going on in America’s heartland on energy—is making sure that America now has a manufacturing renaissance,” he said.

You may also be surprised that Emanuel’s viewpoint was Obama Administration policy, nicely recalled in this column in The Hill. Obama was particularly supportive of liquid natural gas (LNG) exports, and it was his chief of staff, Emanuel, who was instrumental in getting that support.

When Trump took office in 2017, U.S. energy posture did not change much from the Obama Administration except on rhetoric. One energy expert who says that is Tim Boersma, a senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. That may be a bit of an exaggeration since Obama also supported renewable sources that Trump doesn’t; Obama claimed an “all of the above strategy.” However, at least on fracking and LNG exports, which are today’s most contentious fossil fuel matters, Obama and Trump weren’t much different.

Emanuel was so supportive of fossil fuels that in 2016, the American Petroleum Institute quoted Emanuel’s “cheap energy” excitement in their marketing materials.

Environmentalists and Democrats concerned about climate mostly stayed silent.

But that was then and this is now.

Today, Trump’s energy policies would mean nothing short of catastrophe, environmentalists and Democrats are saying. “A return of Trump would be, in a word, horrific,” said Andrew Rosenberg, for example, a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official, now fellow at the University of New Hampshire. Never mind that the Obama-Emanuel policy was much the same as what Trump wants, though Trump’s language is indeed far less restrained (“Drill, drill, drill,” etc.).

The change occurred under the Biden Administration, which turned decidedly against fossil fuels. During his campaign, Biden said, “I guarantee you, I guarantee you we are going to end fossil fuel and I am not going to cooperate with them, OK?” His administration curtailed the federal land and water drilling permits, bragging that it granted the smallest number of oil and gas lease sales in history.

Most recently, he announced a pause on permits for new gas export terminals, which was harshly criticized. Even a Washington Post editorial, for example, said the pause is “an election-year sop to climate activists that will do much more to unsettle vital U.S. alliances than to save the planet.”

Kamala Harris has been far more extreme.

She has repeatedly voiced support for the radical Green New Deal and sponsored a resolution in the Senate calling for it, and she supported ending the Senate filibuster to enact it. The Green New Deal calls for total elimination of fossil fuels within ten years, cost estimates for which range from $10 to $93 trillion. She earlier said she wants to ban fracking and offshore drilling, though she recently backtracked on a fracking ban. The Green New Deal would mean a complete end to all drilling of any kind as well as LNG exports.

Emanuel, however, has stood his ground against energy extremism.

He’s an outspoken supporter of maintaining LNG exports. In a recent column he implored America to expand LNG exports to Japan, where he is currently ambassador, to free Japan from any reliance on Russian gas, and he supports an Alaskan gas pipeline project to facilitate those exports. He doesn’t want our allies suffering the same fate as Europe, which lost its foreign gas supplies when war broke out in Ukraine.

But environmentalists today say that’s “like trying to light the fuse of a massive carbon bomb.”

Opposing views on fossil fuels may well be the starkest policy difference between Trump and Harris – and generally between Democrats and Republicans.

It wasn’t always so. Count this as another example of how radical the left has become just in the last ten years.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints..

This column was updated to correct the date Trump took office, which was 2017