Bush has long said that opening domestic energy production is a key to sustained economic growth.
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The embattled Jeb Bush campaign turned to an industry his family knows well on Tuesday with a stop at a shale gas producer in Pennsylvania and the launch of an energy policy focused heavily on deregulation.
“The energy sector in our country is perhaps the most valued out of any that exists”, he said.
But there was little in his remarks to please environmentalists, who were often at odds with Mr. Bush’s brother, former President George W. Bush. But I bet poor whites would make themselves quite visible and vocal if Jeb Bush accused them of only wanting free stuff. “He doesn’t like to be criticized”, said Rubio.
Calling it a “once-in-a-generation opportunity”, Bush says in a piece posted today on the website Medium that reversing the export ban and widening US natural gas markets would benefit USA consumers with lower energy costs, create a new manufacturing sector and generally fuel more rapid growth in the nation’s economy. Bush cites studies suggesting a drop of 6 cents per gallon over time if the ban were lifted.
Bush’s call for lifting the decades-old crude export ban puts him in lockstep with Congressional Republicans. Bush’s proposal also includes plans to approve the Keystone XI pipeline, which would carry crude from Canada to Texas. Along with the appointment, Bush got Pruitt’s endorsement for president. He said Obama and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton “have badly politicized” the permitting process for the project, delaying it for seven years. Unsurprisingly-though no less disappointingly-the Republican hopeful’s plan makes absolutely no mention of man-made climate change, let alone offer a single proposal to address it. Fred Zeidman, one of Bush’s operatives, sums up their cluelessness in one revealing statement to Politico: “There’s a lot of concern that if [emphasis mine] the conservative wing of our party takes control, that no Republican [presidential candidate] has a chance; so a lot of folks are waiting to see what happens with the shutdown”. “For instance, unless it is quickly addressed by the courts, in the near-term, Obama’s carbon rule will increase electricity prices for everyone and threaten the system’s reliability”.
Doing so, he argued, required reconsidering environmental regulations, and deferring more to states on drilling decisions. “At least two states, Alaska and Virginia, have expressed an interest in further developing energy resources but have been thwarted or constrained by the Obama administration”.
The result is societies that have significantly lower inequality than we do, not because they aren’t capitalist (they are) but because government policy ameliorates the inequality that unfettered capitalism brings. “Their citizens and leaders are best able to weigh the benefits and costs of oil and gas development”.
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“I don’t think the science is clear on what percentage [of climate change] is man-made and … what percentage is natural”.
