Donald Trump really is going to make America great again. It wasn’t just a campaign slogan: Trump is for real—and one of the great pleasures in the coming years is going to be the joy of watching all those pundits who think he’s going to be a disaster being proved wrong again and again.
Nowhere will this be more evident than in his policies on energy and the environment.
As you know, I made a trip to Washington, D.C. just before Christmas to check out the lie of the land. What I wanted to find out was just how serious Trump is about slaying the Green Blob which has caused so much misery and expense in the U.S. and across the world for the last thirty or forty years. And after a series of private briefings with administration insiders and members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, I came back heartened.
Here’s how one of them put it:
“Trump is going to send his tanks into the swamp from Day One. He knows there isn’t time to lose and he knows that every day that passes those tanks are going to get sucked deeper into the slime…” [by ‘the slime’ my anonymous informant meant, of course, the liberal/DC establishment which will do everything in its power to frustrate Trump] “…We’re going to go in fast and we’re going to go in hard. They won’t know what hit them.”
And let’s make something clear to all those ‘sensible’ conservatives—the centrist squishes who supported #NeverTrump and who will insist, even now, on telling us how uncomfortable they feel about the new regime, as though having a left-wing, establishment crook like Hillary would have been preferable—Trump is the ONLY Republican candidate who would have made this stuff happen.
Compare and contrast what would have happened if a “safe” GOP candidate like Jeb Bush was now on his way to the White House.
During the presidential campaigns, Jeb Bush was asked what his policy on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would be if he got elected: “I’ll hire the best people. And I’ll do the right thing,” he said.
In other words, Jeb Bush would have done precisely zilch to rein in one of the most destructive, overbearing and uncontrollable agencies within the U.S. government.
Trump is different because, unlike his mainstream GOP former rivals he feels absolutely no need to compromise or to green virtue-signal. He has never made any bones about his conviction that “climate change” is a con and that the US economy has been held hostage by eco-loons and that blue-collar Americans have been denied jobs because of the environmental policies imposed on them by uptown pajama boys.
So what are his plans for energy and the environment?
Well in fact, it’s no secret. He set them out very clearly in the speech he gave on May 26, 2016 in North Dakota.
Here is my 100-day action plan:
- We’re going to rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions including the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule.
- We’re going to save the coal industry and other industries threatened by Hillary Clinton’s extremist agenda.
- I’m going to ask Trans Canada to renew its permit application for the Keystone Pipeline.
- We’re going to lift moratoriums on energy production in federal areas
- We’re going to revoke policies that impose unwarranted restrictions on new drilling technologies. These technologies create millions of jobs with a smaller footprint than ever before.
- We’re going to cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.
- Any regulation that is outdated, unnecessary, bad for workers, or contrary to the national interest will be scrapped. We will also eliminate duplication, provide regulatory certainty, and trust local officials and local residents.
- Any future regulation will go through a simple test: is this regulation good for the American worker? If it doesn’t pass this test, the rule will not be approved.
What’s so brilliant about this—and why Trump’s critics underestimate him at their peril—is that it expresses more clearly than any leading conservative politician has ever done before that environmentalism is essentially an attack on jobs and growth.
