Trump’s Nixonian Pivot

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) News of high-level appointments have been streaming out of Trump Tower all this week and last, and two trends are already clear: it’s a group mostly out of the business and military communities, and there’s a pivot to Russia on.

But Nixon of 1969 wasn’t the Nixon (yet) of Watergate. Those scandals lay far ahead and the comparison between Trump and Nixon is based on what transpired in 1968 and 2016, not the scandals of 1973-74.

The Environmental Protection Agency was created under the Nixon Administration, by the way, and Nixon was the first president that focused national attention on energy security in the wake of the first oil embargo, in 1973. So the themes of that presidency have direct application to today, and offer us a window of comparison where we might ask, how really different and radical is the Trump Administration — and how much apprehension is accordingly justifiable?

What does it mean when a Republican president-elect stacks his Cabinet with business figures instead of career politicians or academics? Not much really. The GOP has been a party of business since its formation in 1854 — it’s about the only thing Abraham Lincoln might recognize in a party which opposes large government investment in infrastructure, talks up states rights, doesn’t like blue states (although they don’t like grey states, either) and has low support amongst African-Americans.

So, relax. It means that the GOP will run an administration that dislikes the spread of federal government — not the principle of government — and likes government to leave business alone, more or less. As in Nixon days, Reagan days, and Bush days.

The Senate Environment and Public Works committee is stacked with senators from Oklahoma, Louisiana, Alaska, West Virginia, Wyoming and Idaho — so, expecteth not a rejection of the Pruitt nomination. But rather think of it as a call on Senators Deb Fisher of Nebraska and Mike Rounds of South Dakota to get some clarity on Administrator-designate Pruitt’s views on “keeping the RFS on track.”

However, let’s keep in mind one thing. While the EPA has wide discretion when it comes to setting renewable fuel targets for cellulosic biofuels (staring with 2018, for this Administration) and biomass-basel diesel (starting in 2019), the power of the agency to waive down Congressionally-Mandated volumes of other fuels is an attempt to increase federal regulatory control that a) even the Obama Administration finally abandoned in the face of lawsuits from industry and b) kinda goes against the general Trump theme of being for domestic energy production and manufacturing.

A more obvious area of concern for EPA is its oversight of pathway approvals for new fuels. We would hope that the EPA would find a way to speed up the advance of new fuels, instead of trapping them in the swamp that we’re supposed to be draining.

Given that Governor (Rick) Perry once petitioned the EPA to suspend the Renewable Fuel Standard, there’s some apprehension over the arrival of the Governor in DC to head the Department of Energy, a department that he vowed, when running for President in 2012, to eliminate.

However, let’s focus on the fact that the Obama Administration refocused the DOE, when it came to bioenergy, on R&D program. Commercialization support was generally focused on the Department of Agriculture as part of its rural development mandate — there have been some exceptions but generally the lead program at DOE for fuels and chemicals is the Bioenergy technologies Office (BETO), and there’s no national consensus on rolling back R&D related to energy security.

The pivot is now towards a rapprochement with Russia — possibly on a wide range of issues. The appointment of a corporate chief with long experience in Russia as Secretary of State is a policy marker. Increased visibility for links with Taiwan are another sign. Russia shares a long border with China and is a traditional rival. It may not prove as tempting as the pivot to China — which re-activated long US-China ties and also took into account that the Soviet economy was weak and needed to be strategically stressed. That’s less an option with the comparatively robust Chinese economy.

The issue is whether Europe is the long-range focus of US defense policy, or whether Trump will follow Obama’s pivot toward the Pacific.

For the time being, expect all of this to impact bioenergy very little, except in one way. The Administration will be far too focused on trade, immigration, tax and foreign relations to work hard on energy policy, so status quo may well be the order of the day. New policy will be hard to accomplish, old policy will be hard to push aside, where intense White House focus is required. READ MORE