Day 2: White House Website Purges Many Pages; Publishes Scary Proposals In Their Place
In his first afternoon as President, Donald Trump removed a number of pages from WhiteHouse.com.
Pages for climate change? LGBT ? Civil rights? Health care?
Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.
In their place are pages that simply read that the requested pages could not be found. Trump’s WhiteHouse.com features a number of concerning pages in their place, including one entitled An America First Energy Plan.
Let’s focus on that one. (But let’s not ignore other scary ones, including one talking about rebuilding and increasing funding for our military despite the fact that the U.S. spends as much money on its military as the next eight countries combined.)
The Energy plan touts the idea of clean coal and making coal production a focal point again.
First, “clean coal” is a myth. It doesn’t exist.
Second, as we noted back on Day -70:
Can increased mining for coal provide a [jobs] bump? Yes, but it’ll be short-term as demand for coal has stagnated. As James Conca with Forbes articulated, “It doesn’t make a lot of financial sense to expand coal use again within the United States.” The economics just aren’t there for coal.
Trump wants to see more domestic energy production. It has steadily increased for generations. As of 2013, domestic energy production already accounted for 84% of U.S. demand.
The Trump plan uses eye popping numbers such as “$50 trillion in untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves…” These numbers are intended to have readers salivating at huge numbers, but largely ignore the short-term and long-term costs and difficulties in extracting those energy sources. Environmental degradation, fracking, increased greenhouse gas emissions are all logical consequences from Trump’s statements.
A far more prudent plan for workers and industries that have seen their jobs consumed by green energy would be reinvention. For instance, as we previously argued, the Rust Belt is primed to pursue inclusion in emerging industries by taking advantage of the quality colleges and universities in the area, and through the use of cheap land and strategic location to attract smart, long-lasting, diverse companies to expand there.
Evolve or die.
Don’t wait for the federal government to bail you out. Isn’t that a Republican tenet that is constantly shoved down everyone’s throats?
On Trump’s first day in the White House, there was the propping up of dying industries and the deletion of forward thinking.
2 days in, 1460 to go
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