(The Center Square) – President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday night declaring a national energy emergency.
Trump announced the order earlier in the day during his Inauguration Speech.
“We will drill baby drill,” Trump said. “We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again right to the top, and export American energy all over the world. We will be a rich nation again and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”
The order states that high energy prices are an “active threat to the American people.”
“The policies of the previous administration have driven our Nation into a national emergency, where a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid, require swift and decisive action,” the order said. “In light of these findings, I hereby declare a national emergency.”
To solve high prices and remedy the “numerous problems” with America’s energy infrastructure, the order stated that the delivery of energy infrastructure must be “expedited” and the nation’s energy supply facilitated “to the fullest extent possible.”
This was one of many executive orders the president signed on his first day in office.
In another order signed Monday night, Trump declared it was time to unleash American energy.
“In recent years, burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations have impeded the development of these resources, limited the generation of reliable and affordable electricity, reduced job creation, and inflicted high energy costs upon our citizens,” the order said. “It is thus in the national interest to unleash America’s affordable and reliable energy and natural resources.”
All this will be done through encouraging energy exploration, the elimination the electric vehicle mandates, and safeguarding “the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances.”
The order promises these measures will “restore American prosperity,” “establish our position as the leading producer,” and “protect the United States’s economic and national security and military preparedness.”
In an earlier signing of executive orders in front of a crowd of supporters at the Capital One Arena, Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Accords.
