“Trump’s budget a mixed bag for energy sector”

From an Article by James Osborne, Houston Chronicle, May 23, 2017

WASHINGTON – From selling off oil in the strategic petroleum reserve to cutting funding for renewable energy research, the Trump administration on Tuesday proposed a new course for financing the nation’s energy sector as it seeks to balance the federal budget.

At the Department of Energy, where Secretary Rick Perry has promised an “all of the above” strategy to developing the nation’s energy supply, research funding would plunge by 18 percent overall. Neither nuclear nor fossil fuel research was spared in the Trump plan, but Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy took a disproportionate hit, with its $636 million proposed budget representing an 70 percent drop from 2016.

“This budget delivers on the promise to reprioritize spending in order to carry out DOE’s core functions efficiently and effectively while also being fiscally responsible and respectful to the American taxpayer,” Energy Secretary Rick Perry said in a statement.

The cuts are part of a $4.1 trillion budget plan that looks to reduce spending into researching new forms of energy while simultaneously growing federal revenues from domestic oil and gas production. Among the ways it seeks to boost those revenues is to stop sharing royalty payments from offshore oil and gas drilling with Texas and other states along the Gulf of the Mexico.

The funds are set aside under the law to protect the Gulf coastline, with money directed toward maintaining levees, providing hurricane relief and preventing further erosion of wetlands that are fast disappearing along the Gulf. It drew an angry reaction not just from Gulf Coast politicians, but from the oil and gas industry itself.

“This budget robs Louisiana of financial resources promised to us for coastal restoration,” said Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat.

“Eliminating Gulf state revenue sharing for offshore energy production would punish coastal states that support and host the development of home-grown energy and jobs,” said Randall Luthi, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, a trade group representing the offshore energy industry.

The White House estimated the move would save $275 million next year and $3.6 billion over the next decade. But some officials expressed uncertainty whether eliminating royalty sharing would save the government as much as the White House claimed.

Texas was slated to receive up to $80 million of next year’s allocation, but an official from the Texas General Land Office, which administers the funds, said the agency is only budgeting $12 million because of low oil prices.

The president’s budget is considered a starting point from which to begin a lengthy budget process that will ultimately be decided by the House and Senate.

Rep. Gene Green, D-Houston, said he did not expect the president would receive much support for the proposal to stop royalty sharing. ”That’s probably the worst thing on a bipartisan basis we would propose,” he said. “I don’t think it will be considered.”

The energy proposals come as part of a Trump budget that seeks to slash discretionary spending while lowering federal taxes. White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney on Monday described the proposal as a “taxpayer first budget.”

Within the administration, increasing the federal share of oil and gas royalties is viewed as a necessary tool towards balancing budget over the next decade. The administration hopes to generate an additional $1.8 billion over the next decade by opening up oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Alaska.

Over the same period they hope to add another $16.6 billion in revenue by selling off oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

The prospect of drilling for oil and gas in ANWR, one of the country’s last untouched wilderness areas, has drawn fierce opposition since it was first proposed by former President George W. Bush. That provided another reason for environmentalists to fight the White House budget, which included a 31 percent cut at the Environmental Protection Agency

“President Donald J. Trump should keep his hands off the clean air and water, majestic public lands, and thriving wildlife that communities across the country expect our government to safeguard,” said Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters.

Science is the Answer in Fact

Trump’s anti-science budget will be a disaster for America’s bottom line

From an Article by Denis Hayes, Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2017

In its approach to scientific research, President Trump’s budget can be accurately described as a mugging. I’ve watched this happen before, up close and personal. It does not end well.

In 1979, President Carter set an ambitious but achievable goal to get 20% of the nation’s energy from renewable sources by the year 2000. I then headed the federal Solar Energy Research Institute, which spearheaded the Manhattan Project to Harness the Sun. In the late 1970s, the United States had more PhDs in the solar field, filed more solar patents and made more commercial solar modules than the rest of the nations in the world combined.

In its first year, the Reagan administration slashed the solar institute’s staff by 40%, reduced its budget by 80% and abruptly terminated all of its 1,000-plus university research contracts (including shutting down work by two professors who later went on to win Nobel Prizes). The firings were so wantonly brutal that many of the researchers were driven into other fields. The consequences have been huge.

In 2016, solar energy was the United States’ largest source of new electricity-generating capacity, contributing roughly 40% of the total from all sources. The U.S. solar industry now employs 260,000 people, more than three times as many workers as the coal industry. Most of them install and maintain photovoltaic panels that convert free, nonpolluting sunlight into power. But nearly all the solar modules these workers install are being developed and manufactured abroad. The U.S. makes just 5% of the world’s solar panels.

Defunding science is the intellectual equivalent of eating our seed corn.

America ought to own the solar-electric industry. By rights, we ought to be exporting solar technology, not importing it. Our second-tier status, in a field that we once absolutely dominated, is a direct consequence of budget decisions made by President Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget, and a go-along Congress.

Adjusted for inflation, the budget of the solar institute (since renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory) did not recover to its 1979 level until 2008. Science research can’t be revved up and down like an engine and succeed. If you pull the funding out from under a field of inquiry, it will stall and fall behind at best.

Now the Trump science budget proposes to make Reagan’s mistake all over again, across many more fields.

The administration’s funding plan entirely eliminates the Department of Energy’s most exciting, cutting- edge, high-risk, high-potential research program, ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

Its double-digit cuts to the National Institutes of Health — America’s research bulwark against infectious diseases, cancer and other threats to public health — could mean the NIH will be unable to issue any new research grants in 2018.

The Trump budget cuts the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research by 50%. (Earlier, the EPA’s new overseers eliminated “science” from the mission statement of its Office of Science and Technology Policy, as though science were now a dirty word.)

Federal climate studies will be eviscerated, and references to climate change have been scrubbed from some federal websites. (But, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson famously said, “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”)

The Sea Grant program — which supports more than 3,000 scientists, engineers, educators and students working to protect and sustain coastal ecosystems, communities and resources at 300 institutions — is entirely eliminated. So is the Chemical Safety Board.

Funding for restoration of the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay, Puget Sound, San Francisco Bay and other waterways is also essentially deleted.

Science has always been at the heart of America’s progress. Science cleaned up our air and water, conquered polio and invented jet airplanes. Science gave us the Internet, puts food on our tables and helps us avoid pandemics. Science and technology are widely considered by economists to be responsible for at least half of American economic growth since World War II.

Defunding science is the intellectual equivalent of eating our seed corn.

On Earth Day — April 22 — I see millions of Americans are joining the March for Science. They include researchers, teachers, students and people who simply support good sense.

We are marching because, if we let politics overtake the search for truth, much of what has made America great will disappear.

>>> Denis Hayes, president and chief executive of the Bullitt Foundation, was the convener of the first Earth Day. He was a primary speaker at the March for Science on Earth Day this year.