Donald Trump Said Some Things About Energy

"Imagine a world" where America has complete energy independence. Imagine -- it's easy if you try.
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Donald Trump likes energy. All the energy. And he will make it great again.

"I am into all types of energy," he said in a press conference in North Dakota Thursday, ahead of an address on energy to an oil and gas industry conference.

Except solar is "very expensive" and wind is "killing all the eagles" and needs "massive subsidies," according to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

(Fact check: The price of both solar and wind has been declining rapidly. And while wind turbines have killed birds, so do buildings, cats and power lines.)

But anyway, Donald Trump says his energy policy would include approving the Keystone XL pipeline, but ensuring the American people get "a piece of the profits." He did not elaborate on how he would do that.

"We will make so much money from energy," he said. "We will make so much money we will start to pay down our $19 trillion in debt."

Trump also said he would undo the "tremendous number of rules, regulations … probably 75 percent of which are absolutely terrible."

Those remarks were just from the presser before his energy policy speech. In the main event, he careened from grand claims about how he will achieve energy independence, to nonsensical claims about what the Paris climate agreement would do, to claiming that the Environmental Protection Agency is trying to "impose job-killing cap and trade," to arguing that Hillary Clinton is going to "abolish the Second Amendment" (that one kind of came out of nowhere).

President Barack Obama, he said, "has done everything he can to keep us dependent on others. He wants us to be dependent on others." And Obama has "denied millions of Americans access to the energy wealth sitting right under our feet. This is your treasure. You, the American people, are entitled to share in the riches."

Clinton, he said, has "declared war on the American worker" and would "shut down the mines."

"If crooked Hillary Clinton is in charge, things will get much worse." With Trump as president, he said, "We'll accomplish complete American energy independence. Complete. Complete."

He also indicated he would pull the U.S. out of the global agreement to address climate change: "Foreign bureaucrats are going to be controlling what we're using and what we're doing on our land and in our country. No way."

Other than his remarks on the Paris agreement, Trump didn't really talk about climate change -- which is perhaps not a big surprise, given that he's tapped as his energy adviser Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), a man who thinks climate science is "fraudulent" and the planet is actually "cooling."

Overall, the energy policy speech was high on grand promises and low on policy.

"Imagine a world in which our foes and the oil cartels can no longer use energy as a weapon," he said. "It's going to happen if we win. We're going to win."

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

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