Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney will lay out policies on Thursday aimed at achieving North American energy independence by 2020 by pursuing a sharp increase in production of oil and natural gas on federal lands and off the U.S. coast.
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Romney's energy policies are heavily tilted toward increased production of carbon-based resources, oil, gas and coal, that environmentalists blame for global warming. He is outlining the policy two days after going over some of the details with executives from the oil industry who contributed to his campaign at fund-raising events in Texas.
You wanted to work on an oil rig, didn't you? Run a fracking drill? Pick a number Mitt!
Romney is to predict that a full-blown energy plan will create 3 million jobs in energy sectors and other areas, part of an ambitious effort to create 12 million jobs during a Romney presidency.
Pretty amazing, isn't it? Especially when the oil and gas industry itself says that it could create 1.4 million jobs by 2030 if we put the "right government policies in place." Suppose the Romney people sat in a meeting and said, "Aw, to heck with it, let's just double that number! And speed up that time frame so it happens in my second term!" Sure they did. Why bother with little things like facts?
But wait! There's more! As predicted, Mitt just loves him some renewables now.
"I'm going to take advantage of our energy resources: Oil, coal, gas, nuclear, renewables, wind, solar. North America will be energy independent by the last year of my second term," he said.
But... but... but... in the 59-point plan, it says that renewable energy is a job killer! Really, it does! Right on page 90!
As for job creation, studies show that “green” jobs might actually hurt employment more than they help it. Green energy is capital-intensive and tends to displace labor. Indeed, the track record in Europe shows that new “green” jobs came at a steep cost. Spain’s experience, for example, reveals that each new “green” job created destroyed 2.2 others.
It's true, because the oil companies paid for it to be true! Does Mitt want to kill other jobs by creating green jobs? So confusing!
Yes, I'm being glib, because this is just more utter bullshit from this campaign.
Romney says the wind industry needs to "succeed on its own two feet", even though oil companies would get to drill on your taxpayer supported federal land and the Ryan budget still contains $40 billion in subsidies to oil companies over the next decade. Mitt would subsidize energy research; hey, we need something we can sell to the Chinese so they can create those manufacturing jobs, so it might as well be the new technology that you paid for, right?
We haven't even gotten into the global climate change issue, suffice to say it's astounding that, after all the evidence that has been presented, the Republicans are still insisting that we continue to destroy our environment in the name of keeping the oil industry donating those campaign dollars.
President Obama said there would be a stark contrast in this campaign, and he sure was right.