As we head towards the midterms, the president’s closing argument has mostly been about various people’s posteriors, but he has also taken the time to make several, um, substantive points.

One is his theory that solar panels become incredibly hot to the touch during their operation, and hence will kill “all the animals.” As he explained his theory, "The animals jump on them and they fry because those black panels are hotter than your stove.” This is not true, as anyone with a functioning brain should be able to easily figure out; there are of course tens of millions of homes and apartments with solar panels, and no reports of burns from touching them. Literally here is a video of a goat dancing on a solar panel. It turns out in fact there are dozens of these pictures online—goats on solar panels are an entire genre.

The second point he’s been making this week is that he is going to lower diesel costs by buying some of the fuel from Russia, thereby abrogating our country’s own sanctions and replenishing the Kremlin’s war budget. Indeed, the diesel is traveling on previously sanctioned tankers. As Svitlana Romanko, the intrepid leader of Ukraine’s Razom We Stand points out, this is utter betrayal: "Every barrel on board these ships exporting Russian fossil fuels is money for the missiles and drones Russia fires at Ukrainian homes every night, bringing more civilian casualties.” But since it’s President Donald Trump, it’s also utterly stupid, in that the quantities are too small to budge the high price of diesel, which, as the zealots at that radical website OilPrice.com write, is “set to persist well into 2027.” Of course, there’s another possible explanation—it’s all part of the grand corruption scheme that the Times has begun to unravel: as Anton Troianvoski and Eric Lipton document:

An American energy company intends to buy Russian technology and use it to access a massive supply of natural gas in Alaska, liquefy it, and export it to allies abroad.The Kremlin and the White House were interested in the idea. President Vladimir V. Putin discussed the plan last month with President Trump’s peace envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, people familiar with the negotiations said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. It is one of a series of energy deals White House officials believe could help smooth relations with Moscow and eventually pave the way to end the war in Ukraine.But it turns out that the company was not an all-American affair. The multibillion-dollar project has received secret funding from the same powerful Russian company that was to provide the technology, according to the energy executive who until last month led the US firm and two others involved in company negotiations.

Anyway, there was a third point the president made this week, this one purely monstrous. It came in a speech in oil-patch Lubbock, Texas, where, in an effort to boost flailing Senate candidate Ken Paxton, he declared an end to any real federal oversight of methane emissions from the fossil fuel industry. As Sara Sneath reports:

At a Trump rally in Corpus Christi earlier in the day, Trump shouted out Harold Hamm, saying the founder of Continental Resources was in the audience. In April, Continental Resources wrote a letter to the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] pushing back against measures in the methane rule that prohibit routine flaring of associated gas.

Hamm, careful readers will remember, was the president’s chief donation bundler from the oil and gas industry during the last presidential campaign. Anyway, it’s worth remembering that

Last year, the US emitted more methane from its oil and gas sector than any other country in the world. Methane is responsible for at least a quarter of today’s warming.Julia Kane, a researcher for Fieldnotes, said the Trump Environmental Protection Agency was giving oil and gas corporations exactly what they want. “The oil and gas industry says it’s a ‘good-faith’ partner eager to help craft regulations, but time and time again it’s worked behind the scenes to delay and weaken them,” she said.

All of this, of course, is pretty much par for the course. You could pick any week in the last two years and come up with roughly the same kind of idiocy and perfidy and graft; the Trump presidency is an ongoing evil MadLibs.

The trouble with his current gust of malignity, however, is that right now a pair of Democrats in the Senate—Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico—have been trying to persuade their colleagues, and by extension the rest of the country, to support a “permitting reform” bill that would make it easier to build energy stuff. It’s traveling under the name BAAJA, for Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, I guess on the grounds that “affordability” is something all right-minded people support (except, of course, for Trump who thinks it, like global warming, is a “hoax.”) Anyway, the grand bargain these two senators have struck with the oil industry is hundreds of pages long, and would overturn much of the environmental review process in America.

If you have any doubts about the necessity of making changes in how we review things, read Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance. But the devil comes in the details—or rather, the devil is Donald Trump, and the pertinent detail is whether he can be contained in a meaningful way. Obviously Whitehouse and Heinrich knew that this would be an issue, and they did their best to build in some guarantees that it wouldn’t be able for him to use it push dirty energy at the expense of clean. But from the start there have been questions about this—I wrote two weeks ago about Harvard professor Jody Freeman, so centrist in this work that she actually served on the board of a major oil company, who said:

A close read suggests it's structurally designed to lock in and subsidize natural gas & other fossil projects over cleaner renewables for years to come, using the courts and taxpayer dollars.

Since then, what you might call normie Democrats have been sounding increasingly urgent alarms in increasingly urgent language, and urging the drafters of this massive legislation—currently scheduled for a vote five days after the election—to figure out how to amend key provisions. Exhibit No. 1 here would be John Podesta, the insider’s insider. White House chief of staff for Bill Clinton, counselor to Barack Obama on climate and to Joe Biden on energy policy, chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign—I think it’s safe to say he understands presidential power as well as anyone alive. So it landed with a thud two days ago when he told Jael Holzman that the bill as written would hand Trump a “loaded howitzer.” He focused on the sections around “permitting certainty,” which were written to try and keep the president from interfering (as obviously he has been doing) with clean energy projects. But:

This was “one place where I think they made a huge mistake,” Podesta said, calling the restriction on revoking or rescinding decisions “one of the worst provisions of the bill.” He complimented lawmakers for trying to address Trump’s attacks on already-permitted renewable energy projects, including stop-work orders on offshore wind facilities under construction, and for seeking commitments from the administration to continue permitting projects in exchange for a deal.However, Podesta said they are “going to have to take it out” or significantly revise it because he believes this language would allow Trump to illegally approve projects on sensitive or protected lands and courts would not be able to force the government to undo approvals that violate the law. He argued this would mean Trump could permit development in many areas land conservation groups, tribes, and anti-drilling advocates have long fought to protect from industry, including the Chaco Culture National Historic Park in New Mexico, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, and the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.“I think they have handed Trump not just a loaded gun, but they’ve handed him a loaded Howitzer to go after public lands, to permit stuff that even if it’s illegal can’t be reversed by the courts,” Podesta said. “They’re going to have a permit gorge like you’ve never seen, not really caring about whether they’re going through the legal steps to do it, and under this bill, those can’t be reversed. That’s got to change if this bill’s going to pass.”

Abigail Dillen, president of EarthJustice, who have been leading the legal fight against Trump’s environmental extremism, followed up Podesta’s warning:

Over the next two years, BAAJA would create more legal runway for this president to make corrupt deals and green-light harmful projects of all kinds, and it would constrain any future president from repairing the damage. People can reasonably differ on long-term projections. But once you know what’s in this bill, how BAAJA plays under Trump should be clear as glass…Most sweepingly, the bill’s certainty provisions would render Trump permitting decisions irrevocable with very limited exceptions. The next administration would likely inherit a raft of destructive and unpopular projects, and BAAJA would make it wildly risky financially and even impossible for the next president to revisit them. To be clear, the damage would not be confined to energy-related projects. Think detention centers, petrochemical complexes, data centers on public lands—whatever kinds of projects appeal to this president.

And here’s Carl Pope, former executive director of the Sierra Club and an environmentalist so centrist he once barnstormed the country with fracking executives touting the desirability of natural gas:

Title IV, “Permit Certainty,” is the draft’s most troubling........

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