US presidential candidate Donald Trump has said he would undo the Obama Administration’s climate change policies, particularly a set of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations to curb planet-warming emissions from coal-fired power plants.
At a speech in North Dakota, the heart of Northern America’s oil and gas boom, Mr Trump called for more fossil fuel drilling and fewer environmental regulations. If elected, he also said he would renegotiate or cancel the Paris climate accord.
Promising to restore jobs lost in coal mining, Mr Trump pushed plans to increase coal production, promote oil drilling and fracking, and increase offshore energy projects. The policies stem from Mr Trump’s top energy advisor, climate change denier Kevin Cramer.
Mr Trump also took a few shots at the clean energy industry, calling wind and solar “too expensive”, and blaming wind turbines for killing eagles.
Reactions to Mr Trump’s energy speech from the environmental community were scathing, with NRDC Action Fund executive director Kevin Curtis saying if elected, Mr Trump would, “put decades of environmental progress at risk and make it impossible to grow the clean energy economy we need to avoid the worst effects of global climate change”.
