People paying a price at pump for President permitting polluters to plunder

For nine months now, the great American energy parade has been marching in reverse, and the fellow with the baton, President Donald Trump, seems determined to have the brass band play a tune only his richest patrons can dance to.

A new analysis of the administration’s energy and trade policies reveals a curious and costly contradiction, one that sticks the common consumer with the bill while the fruits of the nation’s labor are shipped overseas.

The heart of the matter, found in the analysis from Public Citizen and the Revolving Door Project in a section titled “Driving Up Consumer Costs By Exporting Fuel,” presents a spectacle that would baffle any sensible person.

The administration has, with one hand, championed a boom in domestic oil and gas production, a point it trumpets from the rooftops.

Yet, with the other hand, it has enthusiastically blessed the unfettered export of these very resources.

The result is a rigged game where American drillers are incentivized to sell their product to the highest international bidder, leaving American drivers and homeowners to compete on a global market right here on Main Street.

It is a neat trick, if you can manage it: creating a product, praising its creation, and then promptly sending it away so that your own people must pay a premium for what was dug from their own soil.

This export surge, vigorously supported by the administration’s policy shifts, acts as a quiet but persistent tax on every gallon of gasoline and every therm of natural gas. The money saved by a family for a vacation or a new appliance is instead siphoned off into the global energy market, all to buoy the profit margins of a select group of corporate interests.

These interests, the old kings of coal and the new barons of oil, were not shy in their support during the last election, and the payback has been as swift as it is ruthless.

The clean energy economy, once the bright hope of a new technological era, is being treated as an unwanted stepchild. Investments stutter, projects stall, and the jobs that were sprouting from wind and solar farms are now looking for other places to grow.

The administration seems to believe the future is a foreign country they have no wish to visit, preferring the soot-stained landscapes of a bygone century.

The cost, of course, is not merely measured at the pump. The planet, that great patient beast, continues to warm under a thickening blanket of our own making.

By deliberately steering the nation’s colossal economy away from cleaner alternatives and back toward the fuels of its past, the White House is making a calculated bet against the health of the atmosphere itself. It is a gamble with the air our children will breathe and the stability of the climate that governs our agriculture and our coastlines.

In the end, the report paints a picture not of energy independence, but of a peculiar kind of servitude.

The American consumer is shackled to a volatile global market, the American worker is denied a stake in the energy jobs of tomorrow, and the American landscape is consigned to bear the scars of an era we were promised we could leave behind.

It is a vengeful agenda, a backward-looking vision that serves the few at the expense of the many, and the bill for it all, in dollars and in degradation, is coming due.