Donald Trump Promises to Cut Regulation on ‘Phony’ Environmental Issues

[WhiteTara]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-promises-cut-regulation-210121525.html?nhp=1

Donald Trump promised Thursday to scale back President Obama’s environmental regulations and called for faster development of U.S. energy resources in his most sweeping remarks on energy policy since entering the presidential race.

“The government should not pick winners and losers, instead it should remove obstacles to exploration,” the presumptive GOP nominee told attendees of an oil industry conference in North Dakota. The state has been the center of the nation’s fracking boom for nearly a decade. “Political activists with extreme agendas will no longer write the rules.”

The speech included a laundry list of commitments to radically change the trajectory of federal energy and environmental policy. Trump pledged to save the coal industry from decline at the hands of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan. He promised that his policies would allow the U.S. to be completely energy independent. He said he would “cancel” the Paris Agreement to address climate change that was adopted last year by more than 190 countries and stop funding of any international efforts to address global warming. A Trump administration would end “totalitarian taxes” he says have been levied by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

But Trump offered few details to behind any of his proposals, some of which defy common understandings of the workings of the energy industry. His promise to save coal, for instance, runs counter to market forces that have made the energy source increasingly unfeasible. Coal has become more expensive as an energy source in comparison to natural gas. Without the giant subsidies Trump says he loathes, a clear path to propping up the coal industry remains unclear. And, in a world absent of regulation, Trump also promised to address “real environmental challenges” like providing clean air and clean water while not dealing with “phony” issues.