Donald Trump’s “America-First Energy Plan” Shows He Knows Virtually Nothing About the Issue - MIT Technology Review

In typical fashion, Trump used simplistic promises as the basis for lavish claims about revitalizing the energy industry and showering the American people with riches.

Donald Trump outlined a sketchy, at times contradictory, energy plan that would scrap virtually all of President Barack Obama’s signature climate protection policies. Calling his vision the “America-First Energy Plan,” Trump said he would immediately cancel all of Obama’s executive orders designed to restrict the burning of fossil fuels and lower emissions from power plants. 

“We will rescind all these job-destroying President Obama executive actions,” Trump declared.

If elected president, he promised to lift restrictions on natural gas production using fracking, offshore oil drilling, and oil and gas production on federal lands.  He would immediately cut off all U.S. funding for United Nations climate programs and cancel U.S. agreements under the Paris accord.  Trump claimed his plan would eliminate America’s reliance on foreign sources of energy, restore the coal industry to its former glory, and avoid the loss of “millions of jobs and trillions of dollars” of wealth that would be destroyed under the climate change policies of his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

“Every dollar of energy we don’t explore here [in America] is a dollar that makes someone else rich,” Trump said.

But Trump’s proclamations don’t pass even cursory inspection.  If Trump were to succeed in driving large increases in domestic natural gas production, for example, it would accelerate the decline in coal burning that has devastated the coal industry.  He can’t save the coal industry, and he certainly can’t do it while pumping more gas.

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