Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016/Energy and environmental policy

Donald Trump announced his presidential run on June 16, 2015.^[1]

Donald Trump
2016 Republican presidential nominee
Running mate: Mike Pence

Election
Republican National Convention • Polls • Debates • Presidential election by state

On the issues
Domestic affairs • Economic affairs and government regulations • Foreign affairs and national security • Trump University • Republican officials on Trump • Litigation and Trump's campaign • Violence and Trump's campaign • The Trump Foundation • Media's coverage of Trump

Other candidates
Hillary Clinton (D) • Jill Stein (G) • Gary Johnson (L) • Vice presidential candidates

Ballotpedia's presidential election coverage
2028 • 2024 • 2020 • 2016

The overview of the issue below was current as of the 2016 election.
In the 2016 presidential race, candidates issued statements on a variety of energy and environmental policy issues. Topics included the source of climate change, use of renewable energy sources, fracking, the Paris Climate Agreement, environment-related regulations, water infrastructure, and energy development.

See below what Donald Trump and the 2016 Republican Party Platform said about energy and environmental policy.

CANDIDATE SUMMARY
Trump said he would tap domestic oil and gas reserves to make the U.S. independent from foreign oil providers.
He supported rescinding the Climate Action Plan and Waters of the U.S. rule, renewing the Keystone XL Pipeline project, canceling the Paris Climate Agreement, and reforming the regulatory environment.
Trump claimed that global warming is a “hoax.”

Trump on energy and environmental policy

In a speech in Pennsylvania on September 22, 2016, Trump outlined his energy policies. “I’m going to lift the restrictions on American energy and allow this wealth to pour into our communities including right here in the state of Pennsylvania. We will end the war on coal and on miners,” said Trump to attendees of the 2016 Shale Insight Conference, a gathering of natural gas producers. He said, “Billions of dollars in private infrastructure investment have been lost to the Obama-Clinton restriction agenda. … We will streamline the permitting process for all energy infrastructure projects, including the billions of dollars in projects held up by President Obama -– creating countless more jobs in the process.” Trump further outlined that he would roll back Obama's climate change plans, promote oil and gas drilling on federal lands, and promote the construction of oil and gas pipelines.^[2]

During a rally in Fresno, California, on May 27, 2016, Donald Trump said that there was no drought in the state and that officials were prioritizing an endangered fish, the Delta smelt, with its water restrictions. “We’re going to solve your water problem. You have a water problem that is so insane. It is so ridiculous where they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea,” he said.^[3]
- While campaigning in California on Sunday, Bernie Sanders challenged Trump’s position with sarcasm. “You see, we don't fully appreciate the genius of Donald Trump, who knows more than all the people of California, knows more than all the scientists," he said.^[4]

Donald Trump's campaign asked U.S. Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) to draft a white paper on energy policy. The Huffington Post reported on May 13, 2016, that Cramer “would emphasize the dangers of foreign ownership of U.S. energy assets, burdensome taxes, and over-regulation” in his policy paper. Cramer has previously stated that believes the planet is cooling rather than warming.^[5]

On August 24, 2012, Trump tweeted that wind turbines were "an environmental & aesthetic disaster."^[6]

Trump wrote in his 2011 book, Time to Get Tough, that the Marcellus Shale was "one of the largest mother lodes of natural gas" and should be used to buy "more time to innovate and develop newer, more efficient, cleaner, and cheaper forms of energy."^[7]

In a 2011 interview on energy production, Trump expressed incredulity that the United States was not more aggressively using natural gas and drilling.^[8]

Climate change

The Trump campaign released a statement on the Paris Climate Accord after it was announced on October 5, 2016, that the international climate change deal would go into effect on November 4, 2016. The Trump campaign called it a “bad deal” that would “impose enormous costs on American households through higher electricity prices and higher taxes.” The statement went on to say, "As our nation considers these issues, Mr. Trump and Gov. Pence appreciate that many scientists are concerned about greenhouse gas emissions. We need America's scientists to continue studying the scientific issues but without political agendas getting in the way. We also need to be vigilant to defend the interests of the American people in any efforts taken on this front."^[9]

Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, said on September 27, 2016, that Trump believes “global warming is naturally occurring” and humans are not the cause.^[10]

Responding to a questionnaire published in Scientific American on September 13, 2016, Trump said, “There is still much that needs to be investigated in the field of 'climate change.' Perhaps the best use of our limited financial resources should be in dealing with making sure that every person in the world has clean water. Perhaps we should focus on eliminating lingering diseases around the world like malaria. Perhaps we should focus on efforts to increase food production to keep pace with an ever-growing world population. Perhaps we should be focused on developing energy sources and power production that alleviates the need for dependence on fossil fuels. We must decide on how best to proceed so that we can make lives better, safer and more prosperous.”^[11]

Trump delivered a speech on energy production at an oil and natural gas conference in North Dakota on May 26, 2016. Through the use of untapped domestic oil and gas reserves, Trump said that he would make the U.S. independent from foreign oil providers. If elected, he also pledged to take the following actions in his first 100 days in office: rescind the Climate Action Plan and Waters of the U.S. rule, support the renewal of the Keystone XL Pipeline project, cancel the Paris Climate Agreement, and reform the regulatory environment. The merit of future regulations, Trump said, would be determined by asking, “Is this regulation good for the American worker?”^[12]^[13]^[14]

Politico reported on May 23, 2016, that Trump filed an application to construct a sea wall to protect one of his golf course properties in Ireland from “global warming and its effects.” Trump previously called climate change “a total hoax.”^[15]

Fracking

While campaigning in Colorado Springs, Colo., on July 29, 2016, reporter Brandon Rittiman asked Trump about a fracking ballot measure that would change the state constitution to allow municipalities to ban oil and gas exploration. "Well, I’m in favor of fracking, but I think that voters should have a big say in it,” Trump told the reporter. “I mean, there’s some areas, maybe, they don’t want to have fracking. And I think if the voters are voting for it, that’s up to them… If a municipality or a state wants to ban fracking, I can understand that.” Trump's response put him on the side of environmental activists. The GOP is typically aligned with the energy industry, but Trump's statement on the fracking measure aligns with Hillary Clinton's support of allowing states and cities to determine whether to permit fracking.^[16]

Keystone XL Pipeline

In an interview with Greta Van Sustern on FOX News in January 2012, Trump called President Barack Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline "disgraceful." Trump added, "Frankly, we don't need Canada. We should just be able to drill our own oil. As long as it's there we certainly should have approved it. It was jobs and cheaper oil. It's just absolutely incredible. I guess President Obama took care of the environmentalists, but it is absolutely terrible. And it is not an environmental problem at all in any way, shape, or form."^[17]

Read what other presidential candidates said about energy and environmental policy.

The 2016 Republican Party Platform on energy and environmental policy

“

America’s Natural Resources: Energy and the Environment

We are the party of America’s growers, producers, farmers, ranchers, foresters, miners, commercial fishermen, and all those who bring from the earth the crops, minerals, energy, and the bounties of our seas that are the lifeblood of our economy. Their labor and ingenuity, their determination in bad times and love of the land at all times, powers our economy, creates millions of jobs, and feeds billions of people around the world. Only a few years ago, a bipartisan consensus in government valued the role of extractive industries and rewarded their enterprise by minimizing its interference with their work. That has radically changed. We look in vain within the Democratic Party for leaders who will speak for the people of agriculture, energy and mineral production. ... A New Era in Energy
Our country has greater energy resources than any other place on earth. Our engineers and miners, the men and women whose labor taps the forces of nature, are the best in the world. Together, the people of America’s energy sector provide us with power that is clean, affordable, secure, and abundant. Their work can guarantee the nation’s energy security for centuries to come if, instead of erecting roadblocks, government facilitates the creation of an all-of-the-above energy strategy.

We applaud congressional Republicans for doing just that through far-sighted legislation. Both Houses have passed bills that will modernize pipelines and the electric grid, protect the grid from disruption, expedite energy exports, and lower energy costs. A Republican administration will build on those policies to find new ways to store electricity, a breakthrough of extraordinary import. Planning for our energy future requires us to first determine what resources we have in reserve. Thirty years ago, the world’s estimated reserves of oil were 645 billion barrels. Today, that figure is 1.65 trillion barrels. The more we know what we will have in the future, the better we can decide how to use it. That is why we support the opening of public lands and the outer continental shelf to exploration and responsible production, even if these resources will not be immediately developed. Because we believe states can best promote economic growth while protecting the environment, Congress should give authority to state regulators to manage energy resources on federally controlled public lands within their respective borders.

The Democratic Party’s energy policy can be summed up in a slogan currently popular among its activists: “keep it in the ground.” Keeping energy in the earth will keep jobs out of reach of those who need them most. For low-income Americans, expensive energy means colder homes in the winter and hotter homes in the summer, less mobility in employment, and higher food prices. The current Administration, and particularly its EPA, seems not to care. Its Clean Power Plan — the centerpiece of the President’s war on coal — has been stayed by the Supreme Court. We will do away with it altogether. The Democratic Party does not understand that coal is an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource. Those who mine it and their families should be protected from the Democratic Party’s radical anti-coal agenda.

The Democratic Party’s campaign to smother the U.S. energy industry takes many forms, but the permitting process may be its most damaging weapon. It takes an average of 30 days for states to permit an oil or gas well. It takes the federal government longer than seven months. Three decades ago, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) leased 12.2 million acres. In 2014, it leased only one-tenth of that number. Our nuclear industry, cleanly generating almost 20 percent of our electricity from its 99 plants, has a remarkable safety record, but only a handful of plants have been permitted in over three decades. Permitting for a safe, non-polluting hydroelectric facility, even one that is being relicensed, can take many years because of the current President’s hostility to dams. The Keystone Pipeline has become a symbol of everything wrong with the current Administration’s ideological approach. After years of delay, the President killed it to satisfy environmental extremists. We intend to finish that pipeline and others as part of our commitment to North American energy security.

Government should not play favorites among energy producers. The taxpayers will not soon forget the current Administration’s subsidies to companies that went bankrupt without producing a kilowatt of energy. The same Administration now requires the Department of Defense, operating with slashed budgets during a time of expanding conflict, to use its scarce resources to generate 25 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2025. Climate change is far from this nation’s most pressing national security issue. This is the triumph of extremism over common sense, and Congress must stop it.

We support the development of all forms of energy that are marketable in a free economy without subsidies, including coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, and hydropower. A federal judge has struck down the BLM’s rule on hydraulic fracturing and we support upholding this decision. We respect the states’ proven ability to regulate the use of hydraulic fracturing, methane emissions, and horizontal drilling, and we will end the Administration’s disregard of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act with respect to the long-term storage of nuclear waste.

We encourage the cost-effective development of renewable energy sources — wind, solar, biomass, biofuel, geothermal, and tidal energy — by private capital. The United States is overwhelmingly dependent on China and other nations for rare earth and other hardrock minerals. These minerals are critical to advanced technology, renewable energy, and defense manufacturing. We support expediting the permitting process for mineral production on public lands. We support lifting restrictions to allow responsible development of nuclear energy, including research into alternative processes like thorium nuclear energy. We oppose any carbon tax. It would increase energy prices across the board, hitting hardest at the families who are already struggling to pay their bills in the Democrats’ no-growth economy. We urge the private sector to focus its resources on the development of carbon capture and sequestration technology still in its early stages here and overseas. American energy producers should be free to export their product to foreign markets. This is particularly important because of international demand for liquefied natural gas, and we must expedite the energy export terminals currently blocked by the Administration. Energy exports will create high paying jobs throughout the United States, reduce our nation’s trade deficit, grow our economy, and boost the energy security of our allies and trading partners.

We remain committed to aggressively expanding trade opportunities and opening new markets for American energy through multilateral and bilateral agreements, whether current, pending, or negotiated in the future. Energy is both an economic and national security issue. We support the enactment of policies to increase domestic energy production, including production on public lands, to counter market manipulation by OPEC and other nationally-owned oil companies. This will reduce America’s vulnerability to energy price volatility.

Environmental Progress
Conservation is inherent in conservatism. As the pioneer of environmentalism a century ago, the Republican Party reaffirms the moral obligation to be good stewards of the God-given natural beauty and resources of our country. We believe that people are the most valuable resources and that human health and safety are the proper measurements of a policy’s success. We assert that private ownership has been the best guarantee of conscientious stewardship, while some of the worst instances of degradation have occurred under government control. Poverty, not wealth, is the gravest threat to the environment, while steady economic growth brings the technological advances which make environmental progress possible.

The environment is too important to be left to radical environmentalists. They are using yesterday’s tools to control a future they do not comprehend. The environmental establishment has become a self-serving elite, stuck in the mindset of the 1970s, subordinating the public’s consensus to the goals of the Democratic Party. Their approach is based on shoddy science, scare tactics, and centralized command-and-control regulation. Over the last eight years, the Administration has triggered an avalanche of regulation that wreaks havoc across our economy and yields minimal environmental benefits.

The central fact of any sensible environmental policy is that, year by year, the environment is improving. Our air and waterways are much healthier than they were a few decades ago. As a nation, we have drastically reduced pollution, mainstreamed recycling, educated the public, and avoided ecological degradation. Even if no additional controls are added, air pollution will continue to decline for the next several decades due to technological turnover of aging equipment. These successes become a challenge for Democratic Party environmental extremists, who must reach farther and demand more to sustain the illusion of an environmental crisis. That is why they routinely ignore costs, exaggerate benefits, and advocate the breaching of constitutional boundaries by federal agencies to impose environmental regulation. At the same time, the environmental establishment looks the other way when environmental degradation is caused by the EPA and other federal agencies as was the case during the Animas River spill. Our agenda is high on job creation, expanding opportunity and providing a better chance at life for everyone willing to work for it. Our modern approach to environmentalism is directed to that end, and it starts with dramatic change in official Washington. We propose to shift responsibility for environmental regulation from the federal bureaucracy to the states and to transform the EPA into an independent bipartisan commission, similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with structural safeguards against politicized science. We will strictly limit congressional delegation of rule-making authority, and require that citizens be compensated for regulatory takings.

We will put an end to the legal practice known as “sue and settle,” in which environmental groups sue federal agencies whose officials are complicit in the litigation so that, with the taxpayers excluded, both parties can reach agreement behind closed doors. That deceit betrays the public’s trust; it will no longer be tolerated. We will also reform the Equal Access to Justice Act to cap and disclose payments made to environmental activists and return the Act to its original intent.

We will enforce the original intent of the Clean Water Act, not it’s distortion by EPA regulations. We will likewise forbid the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide, something never envisioned when Congress passed the Clean Air Act. We will restore to Congress the authority to set the National Ambient Air Quality Standards and modernize the permitting process under the National Environmental Policy Act so it can no longer invite frivolous lawsuits, thwart sorely needed projects, kill jobs, and strangle growth.

The federal government owns or controls over 640 million acres of land in the United States, most of which is in the West. These are public lands, and the public should have access to them for appropriate activities like hunting, fishing, and recreational shooting. Federal ownership or management of land also places an economic burden on counties and local communities in terms of lost revenue to pay for things such as schools, police, and emergency services. It is absurd to think that all that acreage must remain under the absentee ownership or management of official Washington. Congress shall immediately pass universal legislation providing for a timely and orderly mechanism requiring the federal government to convey certain federally controlled public lands to states. We call upon all national and state leaders and representatives to exert their utmost power and influence to urge the transfer of those lands, identified in the review process, to all willing states for the benefit of the states and the nation as a whole. The residents of state and local communities know best how to protect the land where they work and live. They practice boots-on-the-ground conservation in their states every day.

We support amending the Antiquities Act of 1906 to establish Congress’ right to approve the designation of national monuments and to further require the approval of the state where a national monument is designated or a national park is proposed. There is certainly a need to protect certain species threatened worldwide with extinction. However, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) should not include species such as gray wolves and other species if these species exist elsewhere in healthy numbers in another state or country. To upset the economic viability of an area with an unneeded designation costs jobs and hurts local communities. We must ensure that this protection is done effectively, reasonably, and without unnecessarily impeding the development of lands and natural resources. The ESA should ensure that the listing of endangered species and the designation of critical habitats are based upon sound science and balance the protection of endangered species with the costs of compliance and the rights of property owners. Instead, over the last few decades, the ESA has stunted economic development, halted the construction of projects, burdened landowners, and has been used to pursue policy goals inconsistent with the ESA — all with little to no success in the actual recovery of species. For example, we oppose the listing of the lesser prairie chicken and the potential listing of the sage grouse. Neither species has been shown to be in actual danger and the listings threaten to devastate farmers, ranchers, and oil and gas production. While species threatened with extinction must be protected under the ESA, any such protection must be done in a reasonable and transparent manner with stakeholder input and in consideration of the impact on the development of lands and natural resources.

Information concerning a changing climate, especially projections into the long-range future, must be based on dispassionate analysis of hard data. We will enforce that standard throughout the executive branch, among civil servants and presidential appointees alike. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a political mechanism, not an unbiased scientific institution. Its unreliability is reflected in its intolerance toward scientists and others who dissent from its orthodoxy. We will evaluate its recommendations accordingly. We reject the agendas of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, which represent only the personal commitments of their signatories; no such agreement can be binding upon the United States until it is submitted to and ratified by the Senate. We demand an immediate halt to U.S. funding for the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in accordance with the 1994 Foreign Relations Authorization Act. That law prohibits Washington from giving any money to “any affiliated organization of the United Nations” which grants Palestinians membership as a state. There is no ambiguity in that language. It would be illegal for the President to follow through on his intention to provide millions in funding for the UNFCCC and hundreds of millions for its Green Climate Fund. We firmly believe environmental problems are best solved by giving incentives for human ingenuity and the development of new technologies, not through top-down, command-and-control regulations that stifle economic growth and cost thousands of jobs.^[18]

”

—2016 Republican Party Platform^[19]

Recent news

This section links to a Google news search for the term Donald + Trump + Energy + Environment

Donald Trump Energy and Environmental Policy News Feed

Footnotes

[trumpbid-1] The Wall Street Journal, "Donald Trump Enters 2016 Presidential Race," June 16, 2015

[2] YouTube, "Full Speech: Donald Trump Speech at Shale Insight Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (9/22/2016)," September 22, 2016

[3] USA Today, "Donald Trump tells Californians there is no drought," May 28, 2016

[4] ABC News, "Bernie Sanders Mocks Trump's 'Genius' on California Drought," May 29, 2016

[5] The Huffington Post, "Donald Trump Taps Climate Change Skeptic As Key Energy Adviser," May 13, 2016

[6] Twitter, "Donald J. Trump, August 24, 2012," accessed June 18, 2015

[7] Trump, Donald. (2011). Time to Get Tough. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing. (page 24)

[8] Examiner, "Donald Trump: 'Beyond the nuclear' American energy solutions - Full transcript," March 16, 2011

[9] DonaldJTrump.com, "Trump campaign statement on Paris Climate Accord," October 5, 2016

[10] Politico, "Trump adviser denies climate change is manmade," September 27, 2016

[11] Scientific American, "What Do the Presidential Candidates Know about Science?" September 13, 2016

[12] The Guardian, "Donald Trump would allow Keystone XL pipeline and end Paris climate deal," May 26, 2016

[13] Donald Trump for President, "An America First Energy Plan," May 26, 2016

[14] CNN, "Donald Trump's energy plan: Regulate less, drill more," May 27, 2016

[15] Politico, "Trump acknowledges climate change — at his golf course," May 23, 2016

[16] The Federalist, "Trump Boosts Anti-Fracking Measure, Upends Swing State Energy Fight," August 5, 2016

[17] FOX News, "Trump to GOP: Stop playing into President Obama's hands," January 18, 2012

[quotedisclaimer-18] Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.

[19] Republican Party, "The 2016 Republican Party Platform," accessed August 23, 2016

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11]

[12]

[13]

[14]

[15]

[16]

[17]

[18]

[19]

Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016/Energy and environmental policy

Contents

Trump on energy and environmental policy

Climate change

Fracking

Keystone XL Pipeline

Recent news

See also

Footnotes

Information about voting

2025 Elections

2026 Elections

2024 Election analysis

Trending

Public Policy

Information for candidates

Get Engaged

Services

Additional analysis

SITE NAVIGATION