President-elect Donald Trump has teased the prospect of faster environmental approvals for companies and individuals investing at least $1bn in the United States. As part of a flurry of social media posts on Tuesday, Trump indicated he planned to streamline the permitting process, as part of his plan to boost the US economy. Any person or company investing one billion dollars, or more, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals Trump wrote on his platform, Truth Social.

But the post instantly sparked a backlash among advocacy groups, which saw the proposal as a means of undermining the country’s environmental protections. The Sierra Club, one of the most prominent environmental groups in the US, even compared Trump’s plan to a “bribe Donald Trump’s plan to sell out the highest bidder confirms what we’ve long known about him,” said “He’s happy to sacrifice the wellbeing of American communities for the benefit of his Big Oil campaign donors. Trump has yet to reveal how he might implement this scheme within existing government frameworks. Longstanding laws like the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act require permitting and environmental studies for any major project that receives federal funding. During his first term as president, from 2017 to 2021, Trump took aim at what he called “unnecessary and inappropriate” environmental regulations, accusing them of overburdening US industries.

A New York Times analysis tallied that, by the end of his four-year term, Trump achieved the full rollback of approximately 112 environmental rules, with others weakened or partially dismantled. Among the laws he targeted were standards for greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and offshore drilling.Mahyar Sorour, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Fossil Fuels Policy.  (Al Jazeera)