If the American voter had to choose between Republican nominee Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton based on their energy policies alone, the presidential election would still be a remarkable drama, amounting to the biggest referendum on global climate change since the term was coined.
How the country decides on November 8 will have far-reaching implications for the price of electricity and gas at the pump, as well as the future of the US energy industry, which employs about 10 million people.
Trump’s vision is an America where oil derricks pump furiously again, coal miners get back to work, and the country puts its own economy ahead of foreign nations worried about the effects of fossil fuels on sea levels, droughts and storms.
Clinton sees an America where half a billion solar panels power homes, cars run on electricity, oil use is cut by a third, and the clean energy sector provides a deep well of new jobs supported by government mandates and subsidies.
“At a very basic level, it would be a climate vote,” said Sarah Emerson, the head of Energy Security Analysis Inc in Boston. “Do you want fossil fuels or renewables?”
Trump has said he wants to unleash a US “energy revolution” by streamlining environmental regulation, easing infrastructure permitting, and pulling the country out of a global pact to combat climate change – moves he says would promote increased oil and gas drilling and revive the dying coal mining industry without compromising air and water quality.
While the plan has earned him some support within an oil and gas industry naturally opposed to regulation, it has also given rise to scepticism among even his closest allies over whether he can deliver.
Trump’s energy plan would force the US to make an abrupt turnabout on the environment
“Obama hasn’t shut down drilling – what has shut down drilling is price,” Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens, a Trump supporter, told Reuters. “I don’t know what Trump can do to help the industry.”
A technology-driven drilling boom has pushed US oil and gas production up 70 per cent since President Barack Obama took office in 2008, making America the top producer in the world, but it has also triggered a slump in prices as demand has failed to keep up.
Oil prices are running at four-month highs around $50 a barrel after the OPEC cartel signalled in September it may make its first production cut in eight years, but prices remain less than half their levels from mid-2014.
While the price crash has been a boon for consumers and energy-intensive businesses, dozens of energy companies have gone bankrupt, putting blue collar workers in the coal mines, shale fields and oil rigs out of work.
Critics have said Trump’s plan to revive natural gas drilling would finish off the very coal industry he promises to restore, because the two fuels compete. It would “seem to defy basic market laws of supply and demand,” said Jason Bordoff, a former energy adviser to Obama.
Trump’s energy plan would also force the United States to make an abrupt turnabout on the environment: He wants to withdraw from the global climate change pact agreed in Paris last year. He has called climate change a hoax and has argued the Paris deal would cost the US economy trillions of dollars and put it at a disadvantage.
Trump wants to rescind the Clean Power Plan to limit carbon output and downgrade the Environmental Protection Agency to a commission, not a Cabinet level agency, and refocus it on its “core mission: clean air and clean water for all Americans, regardless of race or income.”
An oil industry lobbyist in Washington DC said that even if Trump’s policies were unlikely to solve the root problem facing the industry right now – the low price of oil and gas – his ideas were still mainly welcomed.
“Regulation is a killer, and if it can be streamlined, it helps,” he said.
Environmental advocates argue that a failure to agree on strong measures like the Paris accord would doom the world to ever-hotter average temperatures, bringing with them deadlier storms, more frequent droughts and rising sea levels as polar ice caps melt.
Clinton says she wants to address that by making America a “clean energy superpower”. Her plan calls for phasing out fossil fuels, embracing clean energy sources like solar and wind, strengthening environmental protections and leading the world in curbing carbon dioxide emissions blamed for climate change.
“We can deploy a half a billion more solar panels. We can have enough clean energy to power every home. We can build a new modern electric grid. That’s a lot of jobs. That’s a lot of new economic activity,” Clinton said in the first presidential debate in September.