One of the contents of Trump's energy policy is to open federal land to extract oil. The picture shows the deer herd passing through a warehouse, where the oil pipeline is stored in the warehouse on January 25, 2017.

Trump One of the contents of energy policy is to open federal land to extract oil. The picture shows a deer passing through a warehouse in Gascoyne, North Dakota, USA on January 25, 2017. The oil pipeline stored in the warehouse will be used for the "Basestone Oil Pipeline" project. In March 2017, Trump officially approved the project. Critics believe the project will intensify U.S. dependence on oil, harming land and wildlife along the project. Visual China Information

html From November 20 to 21, a high-end forum called "The Impact of Energy Choice on Environment, Public Health and Agricultural Development" was held in Taipei. The forum was hosted by Washington University in St. Louis, USA. This event is part of the university's annual Greater China Forum series. The scientists attending the conference include former US President Obama , a member of the American Academy of Sciences, as well as many scientists and education administrators from Tsinghua University , Taiwan University, Taiwan Jiaotong University , Hong Kong Chinese University , as well as representatives from the industry, commerce and industry. The organizer of the

forum said that Greater China, including mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, is a major energy consumer in the world today, and an important area for energy development innovation and energy policy reform. Their achievements are obvious to all, and they have set goals for energy industry development that are enough to change the world. For example, mainland China is currently the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter, and promises to make one-fifth of its country's energy consumption come from non-fossil fuels by 2030; Taiwan plans to denuclearize its energy supply by 2025, and renewable energy will provide one-fifth of its energy consumption on the island; Hong Kong plans to reduce carbon emissions by 65% ​​to 70% by 2030. In order to achieve such a ambitious goal, the organizer of this forum, , St. Louis, said that scientific research institutions represented by schools should actively join hands with the industry, commerce and industry to jointly respond to the biggest challenges of the world today and contribute to the sustainable development of human society.

It is very coincidental that the forum was held on the first anniversary of US President Trump's entry into the White House. Looking back on this year, it is really unusual. Trump tweeted the country, challenged the mainstream American media, and continued to "war of words" with allied leaders and political opponents. He has repeatedly touched the red and bottom lines of American politics, created an extremely unusual governing style, and attracted the attention of the media at all times. The media are all focusing on Trump's "White House Political Show", intentionally or unintentionally ignoring a series of new policies introduced by the Trump administration in terms of internal affairs. Taking the new energy policy as an example, in the past year, Trump has successively overturned many energy strategies of his predecessor Obama administration, such as calling for revitalizing the US coal industry, setting trade barriers to protect American solar companies, re-examine automobile fuel consumption indicators, and opening up federal land to exploit oil.

Of course, the most obvious sign of Trump's change in U.S. energy policy is his announcement to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, making the United States the only country in the world that does not sign the agreement. You should know that the United States consumes 677 million tons of coal annually and more than 19 million barrels of oil per day. It is also the second largest greenhouse gas emitter. Every move of the United States' energy policy has had a profound impact on the world.

The organizers of this forum and many scientists participating in the forum are from the United States. They are not only leaders in their respective research fields, but also provide policy advice to the government and formulate industrial development plans for enterprises. Although they did not directly comment on Trump's New Energy policy, the latest research data and views released on the forum will help us more fully understand the impact of the US new energy policy and the challenges facing world energy and environmental cooperation.

Environmental impact and ecological effects of energy selection

Energy policy has become a topic that is more concerned by the whole world because The energy source structure of countries around the world is extremely unbalanced, and their dependence on traditional fossil fuels remains high. New energy development faces multiple challenges in government policies, market allocation and R&D.

Pratim Biswas, professor of the Department of Energy, Environment and Chemical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, is one of the keynote speakers for the forum. He quoted data released by the U.S. Department of Energy that as of 2015, fossil fuels, mainly coal, oil, and natural gas, accounted for 82% of world energy consumption, accounting for 82% of U.S. energy consumption, and the proportion in India and China was as high as 92% and 93% respectively. 's excessive reliance on fossil fuels has caused huge environmental harm. According to a survey by the British " Daily Telegraph ", among the 20 most polluted cities in the world today, 9 cities in India are on the list, and 4 are from China. Many countries have begun to recognize the environmental pollution caused by traditional fossil fuels and are constantly trying various new energy sources, but at least in the next 25 years, traditional fossil fuels will remain the main source of energy.

Faced with this reality, Professor Bisgas called on scientists from all over the world to provide more new technologies in the fields of carbon dioxide collection and storage, coal quality improvement and grading utilization, coal gasification technology, etc., to achieve efficient utilization of fossil fuels, and further control environmental pollution.

Energy selection not only has a direct impact on the air quality in the region, but also leads to global climate change. The excessive use of traditional mineral energy has led to climate warming . Professor Barbara A. Schaal, who participated in the forum, is the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has served as president of the American Botanical Society and scientific advisor to President Obama. In her speech, she pointed out that according to multiple data released by the World Meteorological Organization and statistics released by governments, the global average temperature in 2017 rose by 1.1 degrees Celsius compared with the pre-industrial era around 1850, one of the hottest years since the world has weather records.

data from the China Meteorological Administration also shows that the national average temperature in 2017 was 0.84 degrees Celsius higher than the usual year-on-year, the third highest value since 1951. Warming has had a huge impact on the natural environment, agricultural production, food supply, and public health. For example, severe weather such as super-heavy rainfall, floods, sea level rise, heat waves, droughts and dust storms have become problems that China and even the entire East Asia region have to face. In 2017, northern China, especially Inner Mongolia, suffered the worst drought on record, resulting in crop yield reductions, difficulty in drinking water between people and livestock, and desertification of grasslands. The wide range and long time of this drought have even attracted the attention of foreign media such as the New York Times.

Professor Shao Er specifically quoted materials released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a subsidiary organization of the United Nations . The organization predicts that in the next 20 to 80 years, rising temperatures and reduced precipitation will lead to a 20% to 36% reduction in yields in major crops such as rice, wheat, and corn. The resulting food supply shortage will have a great impact on developing countries with rapidly growing populations. If it is not properly understood, it will even cause social unrest and political crises. The third theme of the

forum is the impact of energy choice on public health. One of the spokespersons is William G. Powderly, a professor at the School of Medicine of Washington University in St. Louis, who is the former dean of the Medical School of the University of Dublin, Ireland and currently president of the American Society of Infectious Diseases. He listed a series of shocking numbers, such as warming makes humans more susceptible to heat and extreme weather, and adverse climatic conditions will directly affect air flow and aggravate air pollution. From the perspective of infectious disease prevention and treatment, rising temperatures will give birth to mosquitoes, shorten the maturity period of mosquitoes, and parasites in mosquitoes will also reproduce in large quantities. All this will cause mosquitoes to carry more bacteria, spread various infectious diseases, and become killers of human health. The above issues are the direct impact of the environment on health, and the indirect impact cannot be ignored. For example, bad weather can affect people's mental health, leading to the occurrence of psychological and mental illnesses such as depression.

"turning backwards" Trump's energy policy

Professor Shao Er emphasized in his speech that "climate warming" has been widely recognized by the world, and the environment for human survival is undergoing significant changes, and human self-activity is an important reason for environmental changes, including how we choose the source of energy, and the results of choosing and using energy have directly affected many areas such as crop production, public health, etc. Based on research, scientists have proposed a traditional energy-changing strategy of "improving energy efficiency, innovating technology, controlling pollution, and replacing and upgrading", so the Trump administration feels like "reversing".

During the gap in the forum, Professor Shao Er emphasized in an interview with the media: " now does not need to argue whether climate warming is true or false. This is a fact that has been recognized by 95% of scientists around the world. ." She and other scientists participating in the forum suggested that governments, scientific research institutions and industries should start to respond to this challenge, formulate scientific energy policies, improve the efficiency of traditional energy use, develop new energy, increase investment in agricultural science and technology research and development, and improve the marketization and industrialization of scientific research results.

But just as scholars call on countries to face up to the far-reaching impacts of climate change, different voices are constantly being released within the Trump administration.

First is Scott Pruitt, Director of the Environmental Protection Agency. Before taking office, he wrote a book claiming that the debate on climate change is "inconclusive." This "inconclusive" statement is actually a world consensus that openly questions the "climate warming". As the head of the U.S. federal environmental protection department, Prutt is not the only cabinet member in Trump’s cabinet to question climate change.

Energy Minister Rick Perry has questioned the relationship between climate change and human activities more than once. Perry served as governor of Texas before joining the cabinet. Thanks to Texas' strong economic development in recent years, the public's expectations are high. He has run for president twice. In the early stages of the Republican Party's in 2011, he was once very popular, but was overtaken by Arizona's federal senator McCain in the second half, losing the nomination for the party's president. Just when Perry was nominated by Trump as the new cabinet, the Ministry of Energy, the Washington Post revealed that Perry once compared the very few scientists in the United States who questioned climate change to Italian astronomer Galillo, claiming that Galillo proposed the "heliocentric theory" and guilted the entire scientific community at that time and the Roman Catholic center of power in Europe, and was therefore persecuted, but the "gecentric theory" he opposed was eventually proved to be a scientific truth. Perry's metaphor is also a conclusion that negates climate change.

In 2010, Perry claimed in his autobiography that history will sooner or later prove that "warming" is just a complete "pseudoscience". During the debate on the 2011 presidential election in the party primary stage, he publicly stated: "There is still controversial in the scientific community about the issue of 'climate change'. If we adjust industrial development policies because of such a controversial statement, we will threaten the development of the US economy, which is a nonsense." Not only that, Perry also vowed that if he is elected president, he will dissolve three federal government agencies - the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Energy. Now, it is really surprising that such a person who advocates disbanding the Ministry of Energy and questioning "climate change" comes to the Ministry of Energy.

Since entering the White House, Trump has successively introduced a series of new energy policies and drastic abolished the measures formulated by the Obama era, such as environmental protection, energy conservation and emission reduction, and new energy development. What is more prominent among these new energy policies in is that the power development policy of gradually replacing coal with natural gas and renewable energy has been changed. The US Environmental Protection Agency once estimated that the original coal replacement policy could reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 32% within 25 years. Once the replacement is terminated, this goal will be difficult to achieve.

Secondly, the Trump Cabinet proposed to protect coal companies' share in the current U.S. power market. According to a survey by the US government, from 2007 to 2017, coal's share in the U.S. power market has dropped from 50% to less than 30% in just 10 years.The new policy should prevent the market share of coal from being seized by new energy sources such as natural gas and wind. Oil companies will also benefit from new energy policies. The U.S. Department of the Interior announced that it will re-examine former President Obama's policy on banning the opening of federal land to develop oil, and consider relaxing restrictions on methane gas emissions during oil and gas extraction. Once these measures are implemented, more oil and gas resources can be opened up, exploitation costs can be reduced, and traditional fossil fuels can be maintained in the US energy market, but it will also face more difficulties in developing and utilizing new energy.

The Trump administration's new energy policy also includes raising tariffs on imported solar products and protecting local solar companies. Politico, a US political news website, said that raising tariffs can certainly protect local solar manufacturers, but it will increase the cost of solar installation and use, making it even more impossible to compete with traditional energy. In the long run, such measures are not conducive to the development of renewable energy.

The political game behind the US new energy policy

A series of reasons have promoted the Trump administration to introduce the above new energy policy.

First of all, The Republican Party took advantage of grassroots voters' dissatisfaction with the bureaucratic system and largely deleted the Obama administration's energy policies and relaxed administrative monitoring . The Republican Party has always regarded itself as a advocate of a free market economy, emphasizing simplification of administrative procedures, reducing the scale of the government, and relying on market mechanisms to regulate supply and demand and resource allocation. During Trump's campaign, he repeatedly attributed the recession of traditional energy companies to government control.

Traditional American energy companies represented by coal companies have indeed not had a good time in recent years. According to a research report by the Brookings Institution, coal companies are experiencing the most difficult period since the 1980s, with 12% of employees (more than 66,000), returning to the level in 1978, with continuous bankruptcy.

However, the Brookings Institution's report also pointed out that it is not government regulatory measures that restrict the development of the US coal industry. The "cold winter" of this industry is caused by many market reasons. For example, the application of new mining technologies has greatly reduced the cost of natural gas mining, causing coal to lose its former competitiveness in the energy market. In 2000, coal accounted for more than half of the U.S. energy market, while natural gas accounted for only 15.8%; but fifteen years later, the two were almost on par with the energy market. Not only that, from 2009 to the present, the construction cost of solar power stations has dropped by 80%, and the construction cost of wind power stations has dropped by 60%. Renewable energy represented by these two are also rapidly seizing the market share of coal. If other factors are taken into account, including the weak world economy after the 2008 financial crisis, the reduction in energy demand, the increase in operating costs of the coal industry, and the continuous decline in demand for coal in the international energy market, the "cold winter" of coal enterprises is precisely the result of market operations and cannot be simply attributed to government supervision.

There is also the shadow of local protectionism behind the new energy policy . Take Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Prutt as an example. Before entering Trump's cabinet, he was the attorney general of Oklahoma, and oil and gas are the economic pillars of the state. According to statistics in 2014, Oklahoma ranks fifth in the United States in onshore oil production, with 5 large refineries and 10th in the country in natural gas production. Thanks to the wide application of new exploitation technologies, the traditional oil and gas industry has maintained a solid economic position. As the oil and gas and coal industries contribute greatly to the local economy and provide many employment opportunities, local politicians have to consider the votes in the hands of practitioners in these industries. It is reasonable to formulate policies that are conducive to the development of these industries.

What we need to consider is not only the voters’ votes, but also the political donation of gold. When Energy Minister Perry ran for president in 2011, "large environmental polluters" represented by energy companies donated $2.5 million in campaign funds to him. Romney , which was nominated by the Republican Party in 2012, raised $13 million from energy companies. Trump did not receive much support from energy companies during the presidential campaign, and only raised only $2 million, but these large companies spent more than $100 million to give Trump's inauguration ceremony a huge gift package.

It can be seen from this that behind the introduction of Trump's new energy policy is the result of the operation of the US political system: some of the public's wrong scientific concepts, local political ecology, money's intervention in election politics and other factors work together to promote the new government to drastic and fantasy to delete and modify the energy policies during Obama's tenure, which is contrary to the world's development trend.

Scientists from all over the world should work together to meet the challenges

It is obvious that scientists will not give up their research topics or change their social responsibilities because of Trump's new energy policy. This forum just shows that scientists are not only researchers, but also inventors and creators of new technologies, but also bear huge social responsibilities. They should improve the public's awareness of the above issues and provide necessary scientific references for the formulation of public policies. Such academic forums based on schools and research institutes may not be easy to directly change government policies, but they can provide a place for communication for experts and leaders from different fields, and also provide opportunities for government agencies and social management departments in different regions of the world to learn from each other.

The background of such forum organizers and the diversity of forum participants also prove that schools and enterprises, cross-border cooperative research, etc. will become an important way for mankind to deal with international issues. The organizer of this forum is the McDonnell International Scholars Academy, a subsidiary of Washington University in St. Louis. The society was jointly funded by the McDonnell family, the founder of the American aviation giant McDonnell Corporation (now merged with Boeing), and jointly funded by more than 20 major international companies. The society's main function is to assist and promote the development of school-level partners at the University of Washington in St. Louis, and carry out cross-school and cross-border cooperation in major global fields such as global public health, energy and sustainable development, international understanding and communication. Since its establishment, the Maidaw International Scholars Society has developed 34 cooperative institutions, covering 25 cities on 6 continents around the world. In Greater China, 10 famous institutions including Peking University , Tsinghua University, Fudan University , Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University , Hong Kong University of Science and Technology , and Taiwan University. This international scientific research network based on school-level cooperation provides unique conditions for scientists to collect data, conduct quantitative research and comparative research on an international scale.

Professor Biswas, a School of Engineering, which focuses on the impact of energy selection on the environment, showed the forum the energy composition statistics of the countries and regions where the cooperative school is located, outlining the current situation of energy use, so that the changes in energy policies in various countries and regions can be better predicted and evaluated the substantial effects of energy policies.

For example, when analyzing Taiwan’s “denuclearized” energy policy, Professor Biswas pointed out that this policy is indeed ambitious, but it also faces severe challenges. Because currently, three fossil fuels, including coal, oil and natural gas, provide nearly 90% of Taiwan's energy. On this basis, if "denuclearization" is implemented, nearly 9% of the energy gap left by nuclear power needs to be filled. If the gap is filled, Taiwan will face an embarrassing choice, either artificially control the power supply gap through power limits or increase the use of coal, but this will increase environmental pollution. In other words, a beautiful vision cannot transcend scientific evaluation, and nuclear power, as a low-emission energy source, should not be simply rejected.

Researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong compared different environmental governance measures between mainland China and Hong Kong. The former is led by the government, while the latter relies on social forces. The audience can see from this comparison introduction that government-led governance measures can quickly integrate and mobilize resources through administrative means, fall from above and advance at a level. However, this process should pay attention to scientific decision-making, take into account local differences, and proceed step by step. Relatively speaking, relying on governance measures of social forces will help popularize environmental awareness, mobilize the enthusiasm of public participation, and can also take into account the needs of all sectors of society. Of course, this also requires overcoming local interests and striving to promote public welfare.

This forum has achieved dialogue between different systems and different cultures, and international consensus should be established on this basis to meet international challenges in the field of environment.