Presenting his economic plan Monday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump reaffirmed his support for the coal industry. During a speech in Detroit, Trump offered much of the same language he has used throughout his campaign, decrying the Obama administration’s “war on coal” and again noting comments made by Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton regarding the impact of her proposed energy policy on the coal industry.
“A Trump administration will end this war on the American worker, and unleash an energy revolution that will bring vast new wealth to our country,” Trump said, according to the prepared remarks released by his campaign. He offered little detail as to how he intends to do so beyond “lifting the restrictions on all sources of American energy.”
Trump referenced data from the Heritage Foundation, stating that “by 2030, the Obama-Clinton energy restrictions will eliminate another half a million manufacturing jobs, reduce economic output by $2.5 trillion, and reduce incomes by $7,000 per person.”
Trump made similar comments in his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on July 21. “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 at the time.
His reference to the cost of regulations is somewhat misleading as it ignores the benefits of their implementation, 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. In effect, Trump is only counting one side of the ledger.
Trump also took a jab at Clinton, bringing up comments she made during a March campaign stop in Ohio. Speaking of her energy plan, which calls for installation of more than 500 million solar panels nationwide by 2021 and a massive increase in renewable energy generation of all forms, the former secretary of state said her plan would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
“Hillary Clinton says her plan will ‘put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business.’ We will put our coal miners and steel workers back to work,” Trump said
Trump did not note the rest of Clinton’s comment: “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.”
The billionaire real estate mogul’s energy plan, unveiled in May, centers on making the United States completely energy independent. Trump has noted several times that the United States has vast reserves of oil and gas on that are currently off-limits due to moratoriums on drilling and mining on federal lands 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.
