Accepting the Republican nomination for president Thursday evening, Donald Trump briefly noted his commitment to ending the overregulation of the nation’s energy sector. “We are going to deal with the issue of regulation, one of the greatest job-killers of them all. Excessive regulation is costing our country as much as $2 trillion a year, and we will end it very, very quickly. We are going to lift the restrictions on the production of American energy,” he said.
Trump’s reference to the cost of regulations is somewhat misleading. That total ignores the benefits of implementation of regulations, such as food safety regulations leading to fewer cases of food-borne illness, and in turn to lower medical bills for taxpayers and fewer related deaths.
According to Trump, his plan to end the excessive regulation of the energy sector “will produce more than $20 trillion in job-creating economic activity over the next four decades,” he said Thursday, offering no further detail.
The GOP platform Trump is running under throws its support behind coal, which it says is “an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource.” The platform boasts party support for all fuel sources, but says they should be supported by the market without subsidies.
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, in contrast, is running on a party platform committed to expanding many of the current administration’s energy sector regulations, such as the Clean Power Plan. The CPP requires states to develop action plans to meet federally set carbon emissions reduction goals related to coal-fired energy generation.
Clinton’s energy plan calls for installing more than 500 million solar panels across the country by 2021; by 2027 the nation would generate enough clean renewable energy to power every home. She took heat this week at the GOP Convention in Cleveland for saying in March that her energy plan would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
“[M]y opponent … wants to put the great miners and steelworkers of our country out of work and out of business — that will never happen with Donald Trump as president. Our steelworkers and our miners are going back to work again,” Trump said Thursday.
Clinton’s comment was mentioned repeatedly during the convention, though none of the speakers quoted the second part of her message: “We’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.”
Trump has said several times throughout his campaign that he would open mines back up. The billionaire real estate mogul’s energy plan, unveiled in May, centers on the intent to make the United States completely energy independent. Trump has noted several times that the U.S. has vast reserves of oil and gas that are currently off-limits due to federal moratoriums on drilling and mining and executive actions forcing a shift away from fossil energy.
Under Trump’s plan the federal government would scrap any regulation deemed “outdated, unnecessary, bad for workers or contrary to the national interests.” Moratoriums on energy production in federal areas, including drilling moratoriums in Alaska and presumably the current freeze on new coal leasing, would be lifted.
