President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday doubled down on his pledge to expedite environmental reviews for some companies as he blasted a “quagmire” of U.S. regulations.
Speaking Tuesday at his Mar-a-Lago resort, the incoming president declared the “beginning of a great, beautiful, golden age of business” as he ticked off grievances about the environmental review process, electric heaters, water-conserving faucets and wind turbines. Trump also assailed a Biden administration move to ban drilling off most of the United States’ coastline and promised to “drill, baby, drill.”
Trump’s wide-ranging energy remarks come as he prepares to return to the White House later this month and pursue his campaign-trail promises to eliminate the Biden administration’s environmental policies, expand domestic fossil fuel production and broadly slash government regulations.
The president-elect announced that Hussain Sajwani, the Emirati founder and chair of the property development company DAMAC Properties, plans to invest $20 billion in data centers across the United States.
Trump vowed that his team would work with Sajwani to “make sure everything goes smoothly” and reiterated his plans to give expedited environmental approvals to those who invest $1 billion or more into the United States.
“If you invest over a billion dollars in the United States, we’re going to give expedited reviews to everybody, because everyone’s afraid they’re going to come in and get caught in the quagmire, which is very prevalent in the United States — unfortunately — the quagmire of environmental and various other regulations and rules,” Trump said Tuesday.
“I’ve been a victim of that myself over the years, and I think I know all the games and all the tricks that are played, and much of it is just done to stop progress,” Trump said.
Trump also fumed over the Biden administration’s move Monday to ban drilling off most of the U.S. coast. Trump said again that he would reverse Biden’s move, although undoing the ban could face political and legal hurdles.
“I don’t think we should have to go to the courts, but if we do have to go to the courts, you know, they try to be sneaky,” Trump said Tuesday.
Trump and his allies have criticized the Biden administration for the drilling ban and other lame-duck policy moves that could hamstring some of Trump’s own priorities.
“Well, we’re going to be drilling soon,” Trump said. “We’re going to be doing all sorts of things that nobody ever thought was even possible.”
Trump also criticized the Biden administration’s recently finalized standards for water heaters.
“I don’t know what it is with electric. This guy loves electric,” Trump said in an apparent reference to Biden. “These people are crazy.”
He also denounced water-conserving faucets and washing machines. “No water comes out of the shower. It goes drip, drip, drip,” Trump said. “They want very, very little water to go into your dishwasher. Almost none.”
Trump repeated his regular criticisms about wind energy. “You can talk about windmills. They litter our country. They’re littered all over our country, like dropping paper, like dropping garbage in a field,” Trump said. “We’re going to try and have a policy where no windmills are being built.”
He called artificial intelligence a “very big deal in terms of the future,” but “you’ll need to double the electricity.”
China is “already building electric facilities — big, bold electric facilities,” he said. “They’re being fired up with coal. And we’re going to build bigger and better ones.”
