Trump’s California criticism and anti-green energy message is likely to be a constant refrain at this week’s RNC convention as the president tries to cut back on his Democratic challenger’s lead in the election, in particular. in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. Trump won the state narrowly in 2016, but recent polls show that Biden is up by more than five points in the race for the state’s 20 election votes.
Biden said combating climate change would be among his top priorities, and he included it alongside the pandemic, the recession and racial strife as one of the biggest problems for the country in his speech at the Democratic National Convention last week. For Trump, that provides an opening to attack his opponent by forgetting green energy.
“You’ve forced seniors to sit in their homes with no air conditioning in the middle of the summer,” Trump said in a speech on Thursday in Old Forge, Pa. “And Biden wants to eliminate power plants everywhere.”
State electricity companies shut down power for hundreds of thousands of Californians in the heatwave that hit the West earlier this month and contributed to the massive number of fires that consumed more than a million acres, a trigger statement said. Scientists warn that climate change will make the type of warm weather – which causes temperatures in Death Valley to a record 130 degrees Fahrenheit – increasingly high in the coming years.
But Trump has angered Democrats over her efforts to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s electricity sector. Last year, when the House of Representatives voted in favor of the “Green New Deal” resolution, which promptly overturned the U.S. economy to combat climate change, sen said. Lindsey Graham told reporters that Trump is training Republicans to “make sure you don’t kill it too much because I want to run against it.”
Trump’s speech in Pennsylvania came a day later he tweeted that “Democrats have implemented deliberate rolling blackouts – forcing Americans into the dark”, a remark that was wrong because the state’s decision to implement the power outages was made by managers at the state network operator instead of elected amtners.
Trump has regularly taken credit for an increase in oil and gas production that has made the U.S. the leading global producer of those energy sources, even though its production growth began more than a decade ago during the presidency of George W. Bush. Yet the message about fossil fuels is designed to appeal to thousands of workers from the natural gas industry in places where Trump must sign support.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment, but a former administration official suggested that focusing on Biden’s cowardly acceptance of fracking technology could gain traction.
“Pointing to power outages in California as a way to save the Green New Deal works at a general policy level, more than a red-meat message to motivate the grassroots,” the person said. “But I think the campaign will be much more focused on the fracking message, which is very directly and specifically tied to real people, and real jobs, in several major states, in particular Pennsylvania.”
The Biden campaign is not backing down from its support for sustainable energy, and is instead urging the president to turn California’s blackouts and wildfires into political ammunition.
“Californians are struggling with a devastating storm of crises from devastating wildfires to a historic hot wave following the raging pandemic,” said Matt Hill, a spokesman for the Biden campaign. “They deserve and need presidency, not a political tweet storm.”
At a briefing in Napa County on Friday, Govin Newsom in California told reporters that the state would not back down from its clean energy strategy.
“We will radically change the way we produce and consume energy for one reason: we believe in climate change, we believe in science. The last thing we need to do is double down on a future that actually created the conditions that we are trying to address this today, “he said.
The rolling blackouts were California’s first since 2001, when they occurred under more disgusting conditions. Then the state grid was not disturbed by Enron and other traders who manipulated the state’s newly deregulated energy market, forcing shutoffs, even if the state did not experience a record heat wave. The state’s energy crisis has hurt then-Gov. Gray Davis, who insisted on winning re-election a year later but failed to survive a 2003 by-election that soared in Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Trump’s attacks on renewable energy may resonate with people working in the fossil fuel sector, but polls show that solar and wind energy enjoy broad support across the country. That’s the message that clean energy advocates in California have been pushing to help spread the word about the technologies.
Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association, said the rooftop solar branch is more popular in “deep, deep red parts of California” than in liberal areas of the state.
“It’s a transpartisan, nonpartisan, no-brainer technology that Californians just get, whether you’re a walnut farmer in the Central Valley or a software developer in San Francisco. It just makes sense. It’s not about our national ping – pong, political games with DC, “said Del Chiaro.
Many other blue states intend to follow in California’s path to combat climate change by reducing the carbon dioxide emissions of their power plants, and the hot waves and wildfires in the state are only intensifying those who are aggressive. should take, according to advocates such as Cheryl LaFleur, who served on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission from 2010 to 2019.
“California is at the cutting edge of climate change,” she said, not only because of its technological innovations but also because of the state of climate-change disasters in recent years, ranging from fires and droughts to flooding and mudslides.
“I would have a lot of confidence that they will not take the lesson here as ‘we will not think about climate change anymore.’ That would be the very wrong lesson to go away, “she added.
LaFleur, who helped oversee the development of California’s energy market, also lamented “the rush to diagnose what’s going on. It’s a bit like a Rorschach test: everyone sees it and sees what they want. to look.”
Steve Berberich, who heads the California network that manages most of the state’s electrical infrastructure, said last week that increasing amounts of clean energy were not to blame for the rolling blackouts.
“Sustainability is really not a factor,” he said, and he called for “an overbuild of sustainability and a fairly expanded use of batteries” to tap California’s solar power during the day so it can be used more at night when the sun is shining. does not appear.
That is unlikely to change Trump’s attacks on the state, as the campaign has been going on for the past few months, especially as they begin to resonate with voters.
“[Trump] is very big in, ‘How does the audience react to what I say?’ “said Banks.” When he gets a big reaction from the public, he brings it up in more than just states of energy with fossil fuels. “
