September 23, 2016
The NYT did what we should expect newspapers to do when reporting on presidential campaigns, it told readers that Donald Trump’s energy plans don’t make any sense. In the first paragraph of a piece on a speech Donald Trump gave in Pittsburgh, the NYT told readers that his promise to increase production of both coal and natural gas is “impossible.” This is of course true, since the fuels are substitutes. In fact, the main reason coal production has fallen sharply in the last five years has been the boom in low cost natural gas from fracking. If we increase the latter further, then it is almost inevitable that it will result in a further drop in coal production.
Mr. Trump may not know he is promising the impossible, but now NYT readers do.
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