[ad_1]
“The bulb that we’re being forced to use, number one, to me, most importantly, I always look orange,” he said, to laughs from the audience.
Light bulbs have been a common target for the President who has used them as a symbol to criticize energy and environmental restrictions.
Trump also railed against the Paris Climate Accords, which he decided the US would pull out of early in his administration.
“How’s that working out for Paris?” Trump asked, pointing to Yellow Vest protesters in France. Trump said the protesters “didn’t like all of that money being sent to people that they’d never heard of the country which they came.” But specifically, the Yellow Vest demonstrators have protested rising fuel taxes in France and have called for an increase to the minimum wage.
Speaking about the Paris agreement, Trump said, “They were going to take away our wealth. They were going to say we can’t do certain businesses. We can’t take the oil and gas. We can’t do anything. This would have been one of the great travesties.”
Trump also said the agreement “would do nothing to improve our environment” but would instead “punish” the United States “while foreign polluters operate with impunity.”
Trump, in his Baltimore speech, bolstered his campaign pillar of “energy dominance” in the United States, also praising the quality of American air and water. He said “today we have the cleanest air. We have the cleanest water that we’ve ever had … in the history of our country for the last 25 years.”
Trump later said that for “a virtually insignificant amount of energy” the US would soon be producing cars that are “substantially” less expensive and “much safer” because they will be made of denser materials. He appeared to be referencing new auto industry standards he said would soon be released by the Trump administration.
Trump took to criticizing Democrats’ stance on several environmental issues, becoming frustrated with recent efforts to reduce plastic and reiterating his repeated claims about the Green New Deal.
“Then they talk about plastic straws. I said, ‘What about the plate? What about the wrapper that’s made up of a tougher plastic? What about all the other plastic?’,” Trump said, adding that straws are “the only thing we’re worried about” now.
He later told Republicans, “We won’t let Democrats obliterate the plastic industry and cripple working class families with sky-high energy prices.”
He also claimed that the Green New Deal would mean “no more cows. No more planes and I guess no more people, right?”
Trump didn’t spare criticism for his former Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, who wanted the country to invest in wind energy and solar energy as part of her 2016 platform.
“Solar is fine, you know, small potatoes compared to what we’re talking about. Doesn’t have the power, what you need,” Trump said.
“The wind is very expensive,” he continued, adding that windmills are imported from Germany and China.
He reiterated his previous claims that windmills devalue real estate, kill birds, are noisy and provide intermittent energy, adding, “Think of the pollutants that go in the air when they make in these massive steel things.”
This story has been updated with additional developments Friday.
CNN’s Gregory Wallace, Kevin Liptak, Rene Marsh and Holmes Lybrand contributed to this report.
[ad_2]
Source link