‘Dirty energy’ could propel Romney to White House

The GOP contender is gambling he can tip swing voters his way by embracing Big Oil and shale gas if the tradeoff is more employment and growth, writes Steve LeVine

Is Barack Obama sufficiently dirty to win re-election? Not according to presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, who says the president is too spic and span.

Calculating that clean energy is passé among Americans more concerned about jobs and their own pocketbooks, Romney is gambling he can tip swing voters his way by embracing dirtier air and water if the tradeoff is more employment and economic growth.

Romney’s gamble is essentially a bet on the disruptive potency of shale gas and shale oil, which over the last year or so have shaken up geopolitics from Russia to the Middle East and China. Now, Romney and the GOP leadership hope they will have the same impact on US domestic politics, and sweep the former governor into the White House.

A flood of new oil and natural gas production in states such as North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas is changing the national and global economies. US oil production is projected to reach 6.3 million barrels a day this year and in a decade or so, US oil supplies could help to shrink OPEC’s influence as a global economic force. Meanwhile, a glut of cheap US shale gas has challenged Russia’s economic power in Europe and is contributing to a revolution in how the world powers itself.

But Romney and the GOP assert Obama is not up to the task of turning this deluge into what they say ought to be a gigantic jobs machine. The president’s critics say an unfettered fossil fuels industry could produce 1.4m new jobs by 2030. They believe American voters won’t be too impressed with Obama’s argument that he is leading a balanced energy-and-jobs approach that includes renewable fuels and electric cars.

The GOP’s oil-and-jobs campaign — in April alone, 81% of US political ads attacking Obama were on the subject of energy, according to Kantar Media — is a risk that could backfire. Americans could decide that they prefer clean energy after all. Or, as half a dozen election analysts told me, energy may not be a central election issue by November.

Yet if the election is as close as the polls suggest, the energy ads could prove a pivotal factor. “Advertising matters at the margins... But ask Al Gore if the margin matters,” said Ken Goldstein at Kantar Media. “This is looking like an election where the margin may matter.”

Romney is hardly the first major US presidential candidate to embrace Big Oil. Both presidents Bush came from the oil industry, and former Alaska Gov Sarah Palin gleefully led chants of “Drill, baby, drill” in 2008. Yet president George W Bush also famously declared “America is addicted to oil” in his 2006 State of the Union address, and initiated most of the energy programmes for which Obama is currently under fire. And Palin’s drumbeat in the end seemed to fall flat.

The Republican efforts appear to go beyond any modern campaign in their brash embrace of what is dirty, and their scorn of what is not. And the times seem to favour them. In 2009, the GOP, backed by industry lobbying, knocked back environmentalists by crushing global warming legislation. Other previously central issues — Afghanistan, Iraq, healthcare — are still debated in the campaign, but not as centrally nor as viscerally as energy, said Frank Maisano, analyst at Bracewell & Giuliani, a Houston-based law firm.

Obama advisers have said rightly that energy is only one component of a much broader American and global economy, but the GOP appears to have at least partially successfully injected the oil and gas boom as a defining feature of the economic discourse.

Romney grants that Obama is not precisely Mr Clean — while the president has championed clean energy technologies, he has also stewarded over the greatest buildup in US fossil fuel production since the 1990s. But Romney insists he will be dirtier: He vows to open more land to oil and gas drilling, approve the import of more Canadian oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries, and allow more coal mining. As for Obama, Romney recently told a Colorado coal community, he isn’t dirty enough to deserve a second presidential term. The president has “made it harder to get coal out of the ground; he’s made it harder to get natural gas out of the ground; he’s made it harder to get oil out of the ground,” Romney said.

* Steve LeVine writes about energy for Foreign Policy.