“While the Department of Justice filed suit against seven companies for killing 28 birds, the government was fast-tracking wind power projects that kill more than 1 million birds a year; I have to say, it's way beyond feathers,'' he said.
President Trump has good reason to find this situation hard to believe. That's not entirely true.
These two statements contain two errors and one questionable claim. President Trump named the wrong government agency, inflated the fine amount by at least 133,333 times, and used the highest estimate for bird deaths caused by wind turbines. Additionally, a federal judge threw the duck case out of court in his early 2012, and no fines were paid.
How did this mashup happen? It was a product of the way President Trump gets and absorbs advice. In this case, as in others, he relied on the arguments of other greats and weaved them into his own mix of ideas, anecdotes, and characters. (The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.)
The dead duck story begins with oil billionaire Harold Hamm, whom Donald Trump hails as an “energy king” and who helped introduce Trump at the Williston Basin Oil Conference's North Dakota event. . The youngest of his 13 children, Mr. Hamm, 70, an Oklahoma sharecropper, made much of his wealth in the Bakken shale oil region of North Dakota. He is the CEO of Continental Resources and owns $12 billion of stock in the company.
President Trump said Hamm's market reputation was “great from the get-go” and that he has probably been featured on more magazine covers than the Republican candidate himself.
Ham has been telling the story of the dead duck for years. In 2011, the U.S. attorney for North Dakota charged seven oil companies, including Hams, with criminal misdemeanors for failing to prevent the death of 28 migratory birds, mostly ducks, in the companies' waste ponds. (In Continental's case, the winged victims were a type of rustling flycatcher called Seids Phoebe.) Both companies faced fines of up to $15,000 per bird.
Hamm decided to fight the charges rather than try to solve the case.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, part of the Interior Department, said the oil dump in question should have been fenced and covered with netting to minimize bird deaths. U.S. prosecutors said at the time that all seven companies, including Ham's, had been accused of similar violations but had not taken action. With shale oil drilling rates soaring, the state was considering whether to ban waste pits and require companies to recycle liquid drilling waste.
However, U.S. District Judge Daniel L. Hovland, an appointee of President George W. Bush, ruled in 2012 that oil drilling resulted in purely accidental bird deaths. activity” and there was nothing criminal about it. He said criminal “removal” charges under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act should be directed at hunters and poachers.
This was a victory for Hamm, who dabbled in politics later that year. He is a member of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's energy advisory board, hosted a Romney fundraiser, and donated $985,000 to Restore Our Future, a super PAC supporting Romney. Mr. Hamm did not comment for this article, but a company spokesperson said he believed Mr. Hamm and Mr. Trump first met that year.
Other Trump positions in the North Dakota speech echoed Hamm's, including expanding access to federal lands for oil drillers and shelving protections for endangered species in the path of drilling. It reflected the views.
Mr. Hamm's overarching vision seems to align neatly with Mr. Trump's pledge to “Make America Great Again.” Hamm said in a 2012 interview that there are two views on oil in the United States. One is that there is a shortage of oil and gas, and the other is that it is abundant. He placed himself in the latter camp.
But Mr. Hamm, like Mr. Trump, may be relying on numbers that are too optimistic. Hamm said in a 2012 interview that the U.S. Geological Survey's estimates of U.S. shale oil reserves were incorrect, with the Bakken oil fields alone holding 24 billion barrels, seven times more than the USGS calculated at the time. He said he was thinking about it. The following year, the USGS nearly doubled its estimate to 3.65 billion barrels, but it was still about one-seventh of Ham's estimate.
President Trump also used inflated numbers last month. He said the United States has 1.5 times more oil than the proven resources of all OPEC countries combined. However, as of December 31, 2014, the United States had 39.9 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, according to the Federal Energy Information Administration. Saudi Arabia and the other four members of the Petroleum Exporting Organization have approximately 268 billion barrels of proven reserves. Each country has more reserves than the United States.
Encouraged by these numbers, President Trump pledged “full energy independence for the United States,” a goal that no president has been able to achieve since the 1973 Arab oil embargo. The United States imports about half of its oil needs.
The United States' largest importer is Canada. President Trump, unlike President Obama, said he would approve construction permits for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would secure nearly 800,000 barrels per day of crude oil supply from Alberta's oil sands.
President Trump said the project would create 42,000 jobs, a figure often cited by oil industry groups. In fact, initial estimates from pipeline owner TransCanada say the project will create 6,500 direct construction jobs and 7,000 indirect supply chain jobs over two years. After the construction of the pipeline, less than 100 people will be needed to monitor the pumping station.
Trump also said he would use his negotiation skills to persuade TransCanada, which is suing President Obama over his denial of construction permits, to give Americans a “substantial portion of the profits” from the pipeline. .
TransCanada spokesman James Miller said in an email to The Washington Post that the pipeline is not a matter of U.S. government ownership. He said this is a “commercial transaction between U.S. and Canadian companies that either transports crude oil to a U.S. refinery or sends crude oil to a refinery that wants to access and process U.S. and Canadian crude oil through KXL.” “It's the American companies that are negotiating contracts with the United States to transport them.”
“They profit from this deal, and those profits benefit American workers and the American economy,” Miller said. The role of the U.S. government is that of a regulator. ”
In addition to Hamm, Trump has also discussed energy policy with Democratic Rep. Kevin Cramer, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee who has been an outspoken critic of Obama. He is a former member of the North Dakota Public Service Commission and was elected to the state's only House of Representatives in 2012.
Mr. Cramer joined other members of Congress in a court brief in a lawsuit seeking to overturn the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. He condemned President Obama's “war on coal, which seeks to put all coal mines out of business,” and wrote on his website, “This administration is looking for problems and not creating solutions, and yet it is clearly for political purposes only. “It appears to be destroying private industry.” ”
He supported lifting restrictions on crude oil exports, giving North Dakota producers much-needed access to higher-priced foreign markets.
Mr. Cramer, who declined to comment for this article, also criticized President Obama's proposal to give an additional $12 million to the Department of Justice's Environment and Natural Resources Division.
“The president should not regulate or sue just because he cannot legislate,” Cramer said in a news release on his website. “Congress will not allow him to borrow millions of dollars to hire lawyers for the federal government to advance anti-employment and extreme environmental causes.”
President Trump seems to be listening, too. In his first 100 days, he promised to reverse the Obama administration's “job-destroying” actions on the environment.
“In the Trump administration, political activists with radical agendas will no longer write the rules,” he declared in his Energy speech. “Instead, we will work with conservationists whose sole challenge is to protect nature.”
