Energy & Environment

As global temperature rise nears 1 degree above pre-industrial levels, the planetary emergency of climate change requires urgent global action. Keeping global emissions within the global carbon budget for a 2 degree world means that we need hard caps on extraction, especially carbon intensive projects like Canada’s tar sands. Unfortunately, Canada has abandoned its responsibilities and reneged on its commitments to meaningfully address climate change, and it is using the United States as its excuse, 

Canada’s emissions targets, much like the Unites States’ own, are far short of the kind of drastic emissions cuts needed to limit warming below the globally agreed ceiling of 2 degree warming. According to Canada’s political leaders, our ambition can only increase after yours to ensure economic harmony with our largest trading partner.

Although it was created with the best of intentions, the federal government’s Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program has become one of the worst and most costly boondoggles ever foisted on the American public.

Its goal was to reduce American dependence on foreign oil and incentivize the fledging renewable fuel industry. But in the hands of the Obama Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), it has become a nightmarish mess of out-of-control mandates, over-the-top bureaucracy, and out-and-out fraud.

As our nation’s leaders work to improve our nation’s struggling economy, there is one opportunity we cannot overlook: a responsible exports policy.
 
U.S. Senators and Representatives from across the country have voiced their support for natural gas exports as a unique American opportunity that will create jobs and strengthen our energy security. As Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) noted recently, natural gas exports represent “an opportunity to really help tilt the balance of trade in our favor for the first time in decades.”
 
Moreover, President Obama’s 2010 National Export Initiative highlighted the importance of expanded exports to create “sustainable economic growth” as well as “good high-paying jobs.” Natural gas exports are no exception.

Ronald Reagan once observed that a federal program is the closest thing to eternal life to be found in this world. The latest example of this reality is the production tax credit for wind power, a program scheduled to expire at the end of this year, but which already has been extended six times. Despite the Beltway cacophony on the fiscal cliff, sequestration, and entitlement reform, seemingly small policy issues often carry huge implications, with economic effects far greater than the narrow budget impacts might suggest.

There's nothing that invigorates Washington quite like a presidential election. But with record sums spent this year, much on negative ads, many in the press have questioned if returning members of Congress will be able to bridge today's partisan divide.

It is worth noting that we have been here before. Fortunately, there is a long tradition of members putting aside their partisan differences to find areas of compromise, even after the most heated of political seasons. America’s public lands have often provided that catalyst.

Over the last four decades the country has pursued at least seven major energy policy initiatives, all based on beliefs grounded more on illusion than fact: scarcity, independence, security, environmental risk, and government prescience. These have driven attempts to develop alternatives to oil and reduce our reliance on fossil energy. Guided by wishful thinking, they have failed.

As a twenty year veteran of the Air Force, much of my service revolved around issues of energy dependency and national security. Early in my career, I had the opportunity to serve on the National Security Council staff of President George H. W. Bush. There, I witnessed the end of the Cold War and the victory of freedom over tyranny. This was a bipartisan effort over decades. I was there too when we rolled back Iraqi forces from Kuwait, another effort that had broad support across the political spectrum, and I was with President Bush when he attended the Rio Summit 1992, placing a marker with the international community that climate change and alternative forms of energy were a top priority for the world’s leaders. Since the Rio Summit, we have found ourselves increasingly dependent upon fossil fuel, with our national security tethered to unfriendly nations and subject to volatile global markets.  To free us from the whims of distant countries, America must invest in renewable technologies and take advantage of our energy resources here at home.

As part of the arms race between the United States and Russia that fueled the Cold War, Congress established the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) under the Defense Production Act of 1950. CFIUS’s purpose was to review transactions that could result in the control of a U.S. business by a foreign person to determine the effect of such transactions on the national security of the United States. CFIUS, the only committee of its kind in the world, is an artifact of Cold War-era fears about Soviet threats to America, but it is having the very real effect of reigning terror upon job creation in America.

Energy is the issue of our time. No other issue will have a greater impact on our future, our air quality, our water resources, our economy, and our quality of life.

The central question is whether we will shape our energy and economic future through sustained strategic investment and development, or whether we will allow other nations’ economic and energy policies to shape us. This is what Congress must ask itself as it again considers the renewal of the wind energy production tax credit (PTC). And for the future of wind energy in America, this question has become increasingly critical throughout 2012 because of Congressional inaction. The wind industry, which directly employs some 75,000 people in good paying jobs in states across the nation, has already lost over 3,000 jobs and stands to lose another 30,000 within the next few months if Congress fails to extend this job-critical credit.

President Obama’s recent remarks regarding climate change policy, which have come under fierce attack from many environmentalists, in fact represent important new discipline in the administration’s political framing of its key priorities. As he made clear at his post-election press conference, the president intends to make policies to help the struggling middle class and restore robust economic growth the sine qua non of his second term. This renewed economic emphasis is a hopeful sign that the administration will be in a much stronger political position to pursue many long-term policy goals over the next few years, including action on climate change.