An odd mixture of apprehension and anticipation permeates the industrial market in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, as leaders wait to see just how a Trump presidency will impact their business models in 2017 and beyond.
As 10/12 Industry Report details in a new feature in its new quarterly issue, optimism is the prevailing mood in industry, primarily due to an expected relaxation of environmental regulations and a more favorable tax structure. However, the outlook is somewhat tempered by concerns over Trump’s tough stands on immigration and international trade.
David Dismukes, executive director of LSU’s Center for Energy Studies, expects that Trump will allow market forces to regulate the economy more so than the previous administration. “What I see is them reducing a lot of environmental uncertainty, regulatory uncertainty and tax uncertainty on industry that we had to face in a Democratic administration,” Dismukes says. “I think this is going to be a great administration for putting in a pipeline. I think they’re going to be an early winner in all of this.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean that all pending environmental initiatives will fall by the wayside. On the contrary, it might actually eliminate some of the roadblocks to implementation that existed in the past. “It wouldn’t surprise me to see a lot of people saying, ‘Hey, why don’t we deal with this problem the way we want it done and get it done while we’ve got all three branches of government,” Dismukes says. “That way, we remove this uncertainty.”
Greg Bowser, president of the Louisiana Chemical Association, says his members are generally optimistic about a Trump presidency, mostly because of Trump’s environmental stance. “The Obama administration had proposed a lot of stuff that was causing some problems for us. We do expect it to be different,” Bowser says.
He says the Environmental Protection Agency will likely back off its Clean Power Plan timeline, which currently calls for electrical generators to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 30% by 2030. Twenty-nine states—including Louisiana—sued the EPA following the plan’s promulgation, prompting the U.S. Supreme Court to issue a stay in 2016.
Bowser has said in the past that the Clean Power Plan would be problematic for industry because of the higher utility rates that would result. “However, with things changing in Washington, I don’t think [the lawsuit] is going to be necessary,” he says. “I think the new administration will probably have a different mindset.”
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