Trump's 'humiliating defeat' a big win for one of his top enemies: Nobel economist

There is a major irony to President Donald Trump’s ‘humiliating defeat’ in Iran, writes Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. While Trump loathes green energy and is spending billions in taxpayer dollars to oppose it, in an ironic twist of fate, his misadventures in the Middle East have accelerated the transition from fossil fuels. As a result, Trump has become the world’s greatest “champion” of renewable energy — a technology he hates.

As Krugman notes, Trump has been spending big to oppose renewable energy.

“On Wednesday,” writes Krugman, “the Interior Department announced that it would pay the energy developer Invenergy $765 million not to develop three offshore wind farms. This is the third such payment by the Trump administration to undo offshore wind projects that have been years in the planning. Trump has so far committed $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to killing renewable energy projects… Yes, $2.5 billion to destroy already-approved, cost-effective clean energy projects while Americans are suffering from soaring electricity prices thanks to data centers and high gasoline prices.”

According to Krugman, Trump and his allies hate green energy for a variety of reasons, from fossil fuel financial interests, to the president’s “petulant whine” that wind turbines ruined the view from his golf course in Scotland, to “a general sense among right-wingers that clean energy threatens their masculinity.” But ironically, says Krugman, “Donald Trump’s disastrous Iran war has delivered a huge boost for renewable energy around the world — except in the U.S.. Trump has so far done more to shift the global economy away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy than any other single individual in history.”

Krugman notes that many states and nations were already well advanced in adopting renewable energy, from California to North Dakota to countries across Europe and beyond. And according to the economist, “when Trump went to war with Iran, nations that had already shifted toward renewable energy were very glad they had made the move.”

The future of energy generation, says Krugman, is a competition between renewables and natural gas. Trump has been pushing for “costly, obsolete” coal, but no one wants to invest in it. Natural gas power facilities are still being built, however, prompting Trump officials to “envision a world largely powered by US liquefied natural gas (LNG).”

“However, countries that relied heavily on natural gas were hit hard by Trump’s gratuitous war with Iran,” Krugman explains. “LNG supplies from the Persian Gulf were blocked and couldn’t be fully replaced by U.S. exports because shipping capacity was limited. Countries that had invested heavily in renewables, like Spain, were largely unscathed. A report from the think tank Ember found that since the war began Spanish electricity prices — unlike prices in some other European countries — were essentially decoupled from the soaring price of natural gas.”

Now, the fallout from Trump’s war has made it clear that fossil fuel energy supplies cannot be trusted. As Krugman explains, “In this new era of drone warfare America cannot guarantee reliable access to imported fossil fuels through critical sea lanes. And is America itself a reliable supplier? Can nations that allow themselves to be dependent on U.S. gas and oil be sure that Trump or a future Trump-like president won’t weaponize that dependence, cutting off or threatening to cut off supplies in some future dispute? The obvious answer is no.”

The world now knows, says Krugman, that reliance on fossil fuels is a “major economic and security risk. By contrast, the sun will shine and the wind blow whatever may be happening overseas. Renewables were already rapidly becoming cheaper than fossil fuels. Now it’s clear that they are also far safer.”

Krugman’s conclusions: “Thus Donald Trump has in practice become the world’s green energy champion.”

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