Day of Barren Swarm, 27th of Childwinter, 525 M.E. (Castor): "Drill, baby, drill." I'm old enough to remember that sixteen years ago, before it got to be a MAGA slogan championed by Trump, that was a Tea Party cheer led by McCain and Sarah Palin. But these days, Trump is recycling the chant in his own, unique sub-lingual manner as a catch-phrase for his efforts to move U.S.  energy policy in favor of fossil fuels. But as Rebecca Elliott reports today in the NY Times, oil and gas companies say his changes aren’t enough for them to engage in the new drilling that Trump wants.

Trump’s flurry of executive orders were designed to make life harder and more expensive for renewable energy companies and easier and cheaper for the oil and gas industry. In his orders, Trump defined "energy" to include oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, geothermal and hydropower, excluding wind turbines and solar panels. He instructed the Department of Energy to restart permitting reviews of gas-export facilities and threatened to place tariffs on foreign countries, including Canada and Mexico. Depending on how the tariffs take shape, however, such levies could be extremely disruptive to oil and gas, a highly global industry.

The Department of the Interior has placed a 60-day freeze on new solar arrays and other renewable energy projects on public lands. Trump instructed agencies to stop distributing money that Congress had appropriated for products like fast-charging stations for electric vehicles along highways, although legal experts say that presidents can't stop congressionally authorized spending.

Trump also ordered federal agencies to stop issuing leases and permits for new wind projects pending an environmental review. Already, RWE, a German firm, announced that it would slash spending on U.S. offshore wind development, saying that the risks for new projects here had increased.

Collectively, Trump's orders lay out a road map for making it cheaper to produce oil and gas and more expensive to build equipment that could help people reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. Oil and gas companies are thrilled by Trump’s orders stacking the deck in their favor, but executives say that unless oil prices rise, and by a lot, there's no incentive for new drilling. 

"For drilling and fracking to pick up substantially," Elliott writes, "oil and natural gas prices would have to rise, executives say, an outcome that is at odds with Mr. Trump’s goal of stemming inflation by reducing the cost of energy. Oil companies won’t spend money on production, which is already near record levels in the United States, if they are not confident that they can make money from the extra fuel they churn out."

Oil prices last week slid to below $75 a barrel, and to below $73 today. Natural gas prices have surged recently as much of the country contended with cold weather, but it's typical that they rise in the winter.

Further complicating the president’s efforts to increase drilling is that Wall Street firms, which used to invest heavily in fracking companies, now want to back shorter-term profits.

Trump's reliance on "gut instinct" over fact-based evidence, and a mindset made up of outdated mental models formed by anachronistic experiences, from the energy crisis of the 1970s to the "drill-baby-drill" chants of the 2008 McCain campaign, have resulted in a set of policies that won't meet their intended goals in the real world. But Trump's an old man and these things take time, and Trump probably won't be alive to witness his policy failures. 

Not that he'd acknowledge them anyway even if he were to survive.