President-elect Donald Trump is continuing with his new industrial policy to save and retain U.S. jobs — and it is still more than a month before he takes the oath of office in Washington D.C. Immediately after the Obama administration stopped the progress of a prominent midwestern oil pipeline, by refusing to issue a new permit for the rest of the route, a spokesman for Trump’s transition team said the incoming administration supports completing the project. —Nasdaq News, 6 December 2016
Native American reservations cover just 2% of the United States, but they may contain about a fifth of the nation’s oil and gas, along with vast coal reserves. Now, a group of advisors to President-elect Donald Trump on Native American issues wants to free those resources from what they call a suffocating federal bureaucracy that holds title to 56 million acres of tribal lands, two chairmen of the coalition told Reuters in exclusive interviews. “We should take tribal land away from public treatment,” said Markwayne Mullin, a Republican U.S. Representative from Oklahoma and a Cherokee tribe member who is co-chairing Trump’s Native American Affairs Coalition. “As long as we can do it without unintended consequences, I think we will have broad support around Indian country.” —Reuters, 5 December 2016
The President-Elect’s Transition team named me and others to the EPA Transition Landing Team today. This will upset some of you and will please others. My approach, and that of the entire transition team, is to be highly professional as we seek the information the transition team needs to create its action plans. Our job will be to ask appropriate questions and to listen. Any of you that would like to meet with our team, please let me know and I will transmit that to our team. In the mean time, I will have nothing to share on the team’s activities and I’ll not be airing my own opinions until our job is done. Best to you all. ‚Äì David Schnare, Watts Up With That, 5 December 2016
Energy mogul Harold Hamm will not be taking President-Elect Trump up on his offer to name him Energy Secretary, according to Fox News. Hamm, whose net worth was previously estimated to be $13.8 billion, has served as Donald Trump’s energy advisor and has long been considered a front runner for the position of Energy Secretary. Speaking of North Dakota, in his stead, Harold Hamm offered Trump an alternative Energy Secretary nominee: Rep. Kevin Cramer from North Dakota. In fact, Hamm said he thought Cramer would do a better job than he would. “Kevin’s a great guy, and he would be a perfect candidate, as well. I’ve put his name forward.” –Julianne Geiger, Oilprice.com, 1 December 2016
One month after saying that Donald Trump “would take us toward a climate catastrophe,” former Vice President Al Gore met with the newly elected Republican on Monday in New York as he tries to extend an olive branch on his top issue. “Climate change is just a very, very expensive form of tax—a lot of people are making a lot of money,” Mr. Trump said on Meet the Press in January. After the election, Reince Priebus, chief of staff to Mr. Trump, said on Fox News that the president-elect’s “default” position is that he thinks “most of it is a bunch of bunk.” Still. Mr. Gore has said that he hopes Mr. Trump won’t undo President Barack Obama’s ambitious climate agenda. –Michael Bender, The Wall Street Journal, 5 December 2016
Trump plans to rely on all energy sources to pick up the economy, and that includes wind power and solar, although he considers solar panels a fraud. He does want to end subsidies to renewable fuels, and he is absolutely right. Let the free market have at it instead, saving public money and more likely leading to breakthroughs. Tip of the day: Crony capitalism does not work. –Jay Ambrose, Tribune News Service, 6 December 2016
If producers can find a way to microwave oil shales in the Green River Formation, which sprawls across Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, the nation’s recoverable reserves could soar and energy independence could become more than an election slogan. Even with existing methods — strip-mining the shale and then cooking it, or injecting steam to cook the rock underground (hydraulic fracturing is useless here) — the formation contains enough oil to last the U.S. 165 years at current rates of consumption. Microwave extraction could goose those numbers even higher. After all, there are more than 4 trillion (with a “t”) barrels of oil in the Green River Formation. –James Watkins, OZY News, October 2016
