Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he would rescind "job-destroying" environmental actions by the Obama administration within 100 days of taking office. He also said he would cancel the international climate deal reached last year in Paris.
"His policy is death by a thousand cuts, through an onslaught of regulations," Mr Trump said of President Barack Obama in his first major speech on energy before a crowd of more than 7,000 people at the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismarck, North Dakota.
Mr Trump also said he would invite TransCanada Corp to resubmit its application for the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, which the Obama administration rejected in November. At a press conference before the speech, the Republican candidate said he would seek a "better deal" on the Keystone project, which would connect Canada's oil sands to US Gulf Coast refineries, to give the American people "a significant piece of the profits".
In choosing North Dakota as the stage for his remarks, Mr Trump is appealing to voters in a largely Republican state that has seen its fortunes plummet with the price of oil in the past two years.
TransCanada is fighting Obama’s rejection of the Keystone pipeline by suing the US government and pursuing an appeal under the North American Free Trade Agreement. The company, in announcing the efforts in January, said it is seeking to recoup $15 billion (€13.4 billion) in costs tied to its efforts to build the project.
Mr Trump announced a “100-day action plan” that would include rescinding Mr Obama’s executive actions to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and the administration’s “waters of the US” rule, which business groups have said over-regulates waterways.
On US energy security, Mr Trump promised independence from the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries and said Hillary Clinton’s decisions during her tenure as secretary of state “have made the Middle East more unstable than ever, ever before”.
Mr Trump said he would encourage more US energy exports and reduce the federal government’s role in energy and environmental policy, which he blamed for the decline of the US coal industry.
“We’re going to put people before government,” Mr Trump said. “I’m the only one who’s going to deliver.”
His ability to create jobs for coal miners and oil and gas workers would be limited, said Rob Barnett, a senior energy policy analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence.
“Especially in the energy markets, the bigger driver is the price of oil, which is determined by a whole multitude of factors, many of them involving things that happen outside the US,” Mr Barnett said.
– Bloomberg