[Bloomberg] President Donald Trump’s love of coal, rejection of climate science and disdain for things like fuel efficiency hark back to a smokier, smudgier era. Yet if this year has shown anything, he is one of the biggest disruptors in energy. He just does a different kind of disruption.In a prescient essay published late last year, Jason Bordoff, founder of the Center on Global Energy Policy, wrote that Trump’s energy-specific policies would have less of an impact than his broader shifts in foreign and domestic policy. One look at the minimal impact of efforts to revive coal mining suggests Bordoff was on to something. When it comes to Trump and energy, macro trumps micro.
As outgoing Defense Secretary James Mattis put with skewering politeness in his resignation letter, Trump personifies what you could call a profound shift in U.S. foreign relations. The prior constants of free trade and security guarantees underwritten by the U.S. were the product of a Cold War that ended three decades ago. See this column for a more detailed discussion, but suffice to say the post-1945 order that nurtured the world’s energy markets is now being challenged by its chief sponsor.