President Trump hasn’t always stuck to his campaign script since taking office, but on energy and environmental issues, his positions have so far been non-negotiable.
While construction on his oft-promised border wall is still months or years in the distance, the Dakota Access Pipeline began pumping oil east to Illinois earlier this month. Although Trump has shied away from his promises to tear up the Iran nuclear deal and cancel the North American Free Trade Agreement, he ended U.S. participation in the Paris climate accords on June 1.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said Trump’s energy proposals found a welcome audience in states like West Virginia, where Obama-era regulations have shackled the industry for years.
“Well, I think the president obviously campaigned on this and was, at least in my state, extremely accepted in terms of a direction people want to see us go,” Capito told the Washington Examiner.
She pointed to a handful of Congressional Review Act bills Trump signed earlier this year, which allowed him to roll back recently-enacted environmental regulations, and his repeal of the Clean Power Plan as some of the most significant steps the president has taken so far to enact his energy agenda.
The West Virginia Republican suggested Trump has made such substantive progress on his energy policies because his predecessor relied so heavily on executive authority to implement his climate change plan.
“It could be a function of, a lot of these were executive orders from the past administration or regulations that really an executive can change push through, change through their department or through their Cabinet positions,” Capito said. “Some other areas that we’re still working on have to be legislative fixes, and I think you’re seeing that we’re bogged down, and I think that is a problem more reflective of us than his ability to move it through.”
Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said Trump’s dedication to his energy agenda likely stems from its deep connection to job creation and economic growth.
“I think it’s that he sees the environmental and energy deregulatory agenda as a key part of rebuilding the economy,” Ebell said.
Trump has often cited growth and “jobs, jobs, jobs” as the priorities driving his decisions in all policy areas. For example, when pressed in April over why Trump’s campaign-era “tough talk” had given way to a number of policy reversals, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the president’s overarching goal “was to get results for the American people,” which included placing a premium on the efforts “to get more jobs here” and “to grow manufacturing.”
Ebell, who led the transition team for Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, said Trump’s campaign proposals on energy policy were all so closely interconnected that he could not have easily stuck to one while scrapping another. That could explain why Trump has not modified his campaign energy agenda despite selectively shifting on other issues, he noted.
“The way those promises were made starting in the May 26 speech last year in Bismarck, it’s a very coherent agenda, I think,” Ebell said of a policy address Trump delivered last year on environmental policy. “It’s hard to take out one piece, you really have to — on the production side you have to do it all and on the use side… you have to do it all.”
Ebell also pointed to the unified support Trump has gotten from conservatives when it comes to energy policy compared to the intraparty divisions on Obamacare, tax reform and trade.
“I’d say the larger [conservative] movement…we’ve been pretty good at supporting that agenda,” Ebell said. “We provided a lot of support for him to keep his promise on Paris, for example, even though he was under a lot of pressure to give in.”
“I’m not sure on a lot of these other issues, how well the conservative movement has articulated its support for other parts of his agenda,” Ebell added.
Trump has shifted on many other issues. After running as something of a non-interventionist, for example, Trump has already greenlighted his defense secretary to send more troops to Afghanistan and has taken U.S. military engagement in Syria much farther than his predecessor ever did.
On immigration, Trump once called former President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, “unconstitutional.” The president has since signaled he will try to find a middle ground for DACA, which shields young illegal immigrants who arrived as minors from deportation, leaving some of its protections in place.
“I don’t see it as a selective ideological commitment,” said Grant Reeher, a political science professor at Syracuse University, on why Trump has stayed loyal to his original energy positions. “I think it has more to do with the nature of this particular area as a policy area.”
“I think that’s one of the things that that particular policy area has, in a sense, working in its favor for someone putting forward the positions and the policy moves that Trump has put forward, to stick with them and get them through and to not have to feel like there has to be as much negotiation, because there’s kind of a natural strength in that position,” Reeher said.
Trump’s basic policy framework for energy — reducing regulation, producing and consuming more of America’s own energy resources — has more obvious appeal and is easier to sell to voters, Reeher argued.
“One of the things about environmental issues and regulations and energy is that you’re weighing short term costs and benefits against long term costs and benefits, so that while there are a lot of folks that are in the country that are concerned about the long-term implications and costs of doing those kinds of things, it’s more difficult for them to organize,” Reeher said.
