by Steve Milloy, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow and Junkscience.com Founder
As appearing in the Daily Caller
The Restoring Energy Dominance (RED) Coalition recently produced an ad advocating for “all forms of energy.” “You voted for it, you got it,” the ad starts. It features a clip of President Trump saying “All forms of energy, yep…” What exactly does “all forms of energy,” or its 21st century shorthand, “all of the above” really mean? Is it good policy” And, is President Trump for it?
The concept of ‘all of the above’ dates back to a mid-2000s convergence of energy-related events including: (1) the then emerging but imaginary “climate crisis” and (2) an actual energy crisis caused by a combination of factors including the Iraq war, US dependence on OPEC, the rise of energy-hungry China and India, the notion of Peak Oil and more. Congress’s solution to this was the Energy Policy Act of 2005 signed into law by President Bush. It called for expanding domestic energy production, including: oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, and renewables. “All of the above” wasn’t in common usage at the time, but the law essentially embodied it.
“All of the above” subsequently came into more common use, albeit with different variations, during President Obama’s “war on coal” and his embrace of Executive action to cut emissions because of “climate change.” For President Obama, “all of the above” meant all forms of energy except for coal, which he tried to regulate into extinction. To counter Obama, the coal industry and its Republican supporters used “all of the above” as a desperate means of including coal in the US energy equation.
