Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump promised more than 1,000 oil and gas professionals gathered Thursday in Pittsburgh that he would be the energy industry’s ally as president by lifting regulatory restrictions, streamlining the permitting process and welcoming construction of more pipelines.
“Oh, you will like me so much. … You are going to like Donald Trump. All of the workers that are being put to work, they are going to love Donald Trump,” he said at the Shale Insight conference at Downtown’s David L. Lawrence Convention Center.
“Energy is central to my plan to make America wealthy again,” Trump said, claiming that his energy plan would boost the gross domestic product by $100 billion, create 500,000 jobs annually and generate trillions of dollars in new taxes over the next several decades.
Although Trump was speaking at a shale industry conference, he dedicated about a third of his half-hour speech to reacting to violent protests in Charlotte following the latest fatal police shooting of a black man.
“America desperately needs unity and the spirit of togetherness. … We do have a wounded country right now,” Trump said in a reserved tone that he maintained throughout much of his speech.
When he spoke about energy, Trump didn’t focus solely on oil and gas.
As he has throughout his campaign, Trump said he would fight for the coal industry and coal miners by rescinding a moratorium on new coal-mining leases on public land and conducting a “top-down review of all anti-coal regulations issued by the Obama administration.”
“Those policies are unfair to our people and our workers,” Trump said.