A number of things could be said to be emblematic of the regressive slide in the US since Trump took power. The deterioration of the relationship between the president and the press, the undermining of the federal bureaucracy via 'deep state' theories, as well as heightened tensions around immigration.
This week, Trump signed the so-called Energy Independence executive order, which amounts to open slather for oil drilling and coal companies. It turns off policy settings made under the Obama administration, including a moratorium on coal leases on federal land and methane emissions limits in oil and gas production.
It directs the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to 'review' its own Clean Power Plan, which is tied up in legal challenges from Republican states. The EPA is set to lose 31 per cent of funding in the 2018 budget.
The attack on the EPA, together with the executive order is a colossal setback, given the prospect of runaway climate change. But it could play well in coal country, where Hillary Clinton was never forgiven for saying, 'We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.' Obama's energy policies were dubbed as a 'war on coal'.
Trump may well declare that he is '(cancelling) job-killing regulations'. People will eventually find that it is not emissions-related regulation that is killing jobs. Since 2014, oil prices have dropped 58 per cent. Other projects in shale, oil sands and deep-water drilling are not proving as profitable as expected. All these are linked to job contraction.
Moreover, a report earlier this year from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) notes that the main threat to coal in the US isn't excessive regulation but a business model that mines 'too much coal for too few customers' with fewer workers.
It is rather the renewable energy sector that has been growing jobs. Last year, the number of jobs in wind generation in the US rose by 32 per cent. Solar power businesses created jobs 12 times faster than overall job creation. The 'green workforce' worldwide grew in 2015 by 5 per cent to 8.1 million, with trends pointing to even greater numbers. Trump, as ever, is going against the grain.
In a way, it also exposes the facetiousness of free market pushers. Global energy markets, nudged in part by the Paris climate treaty, are rewarding transitions to renewable, clean sources of power. Yet the response from the