During a speech in Bismarck, North Dakota, presumptive Republican nominee in the US presidential race Donald Trump called for more fossil fuel drilling and fewer environmental regulations while promising to "cancel the Paris climate agreement," the December 2015 accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to limit climate change.
Laying out his positions on energy and the environment at an oil industry conference, he promised to rescind president Obama's climate change rules and revive construction of the Keystone XLpipeline, which would bring petroleum from Canada's oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries.
But experts remain sceptical about Mr Trump's command of the complexities of the global energy economy. And he made claims, such as a promise to restore jobs lost in coal mining, that essentially defy free-market forces.
"Many of his proposals thus far don't seem to appreciate the complex forces that drive the energy system," said Richard G. Newell, an energy economist at Duke University who has closely followed Mr. Trump's remarks.
Mr Trump's decision to set his speech in North Dakota was politically strategic. He began the day fewer than 30 delegates short of clinching the nomination, and on Thursday, he reached the required 1237-delegate threshold with the help of unpledged delegates in the state who moved to support him.
Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club environmentalist group, was also taken aback by Trump's address. "I have never heard more contradiction in one hour than I heard in the speech," he told the UK's Guardian newspaper. Trump gave the speech - which Brune called "a jumbled collection of oil industry talking points that are devoid from reality in the market place" - in a packed arena that generated an atmosphere more like that of a campaign rally than a staid industry conference.
He did not directly address man-made climate change, which he has in the past called a hoax invented by the Chinese, but he took veiled shots at those who are concerned about global warming, promising to only work with "environmentalists whose only agenda is protecting nature" and to "focus on real environmental challenges, not the phony ones". He contrasted this approach with that of Hillary Clinton, whose plan to combat climate change he called "a poverty expansion agenda", and attempted to undermine the practical basis of renewable energy, claiming that solar energy was too expensive and attacking wind turbines for "killing eagles".
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