Quo Vadis, Mr. President-Elect?

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... This Administration is a team, so long as you generally understand that there’s one guy with the ball, he’s calling all the plays, and members of the Cabinet can block and tackle and get to be part of the team photo.

Consequently, there’s less focus than usual amongst industry and Washington insiders on the personalities of the Cabinet nominees, and an awful lot of focus around Washington on taking credit for delivering the Presidency to Mr. Trump. The “Yes We Can” of the Obama years has been replaced by the “Yes We Delivered” of this Washington winter.

Former North Dakota senator Byron Dorgan said “My head is still exploding. None of us expected this result. What’s going to happen, Lord only knows.”

“Almost anything we could say would not seem outlandish given the year we’ve had,” added industry consultant Tom Hance. “Trump keeps no formal structure, he relishes competing interests on his team. The only one who knows outcome is him. It will be a disaggregated process.”

The years of Obamawaffle

It’s been a terrible three years of Obamawaffle since 2014, watching clean energy praised and supported with awesome force on the electron side, yet any reference to renewable fuels as carefully excised as a cancerous tumor, the RFS enforced in such a way that it managed to infuriate everyone in the country and drive renewable fuel investors into the hills. Years of tax credits that don’t last and can’t be counted on, mandates that are applied late and often far short of Congressional volume intent. And lip service of biblical proportions.

The farm sector’s cherished entry into energy markets, as a source of rural economic diversification, did not strike any of the experts assembled by the NBB as a “sure thing” on the incoming Administration’s list of “must deliver to our supporters”. Some are hopeful, most are just plain perplexed.

To learn more, let’s look at the man and his music. The President-elect, that is.

What the Cabinet picks tell us

“The [Cabinet] picks tell us something about the President and his process,” said Jim Massie. “The first thing I get reminded by people working on the transition team is that the President believes that Washington is an insiders town, these are the last people to fix things when they are broken. That’s the ‘drain the swamp’ point of view. He believes that If you’re going to effect change, you can’t need a DC job at the end of it. You see that in his Cabinet selections, mostly billionaires and millionaires, not beholden to a constituency.”

“There are three elements,” said Massie. “First, do we have chemistry, do we get along? Second, Am I clear that you will follow my lead? Third, you understand I will fire you if you don’t? The meetings would last 30 minutes, and then the transition would make the announcement as soon as the next day. This is a man who makes his mind up and moves on.”

So the decisions are unclear, because the man has not yet made up his mind, and there’s a very good chance there will be little to no action on energy at all this year, because the major issues that will dominate the first six months of the new administration are already well-established, and action on the Renewable Fuel Standard isn’t on anyone’s list of top priorities.

Jim Massie thinks there’s room for concern. “Icahn’s voice is resonating in the President’s executive suite now. We to have to have strong relationships within EPA. I sense a lot of wiggle room between what he said on the campaign and what he might do. We have to hold his feet to the fire. Greg Walden of Oregon is heading the House Way & Means committee, and he supports reforming RFS and freezing corn ethanol. The Senate committee overseeing the RFS is headed now by John Barasso of Wyoming, who favors repeal.”

Will the Trump Administration see a tax credit for biomass-based diesel as a lightening of the tax burden on a domestic industry in order to unleash its potential? Or, as a hand-out given by The Dwellers of the Swamp to their claques of supporters? READ MORE