Energy and the Environmental Plans

For this week's issue, we look at candidates' Energy and Environmental Plans, and since the VPs are in support of their running mate's policies, I've omitted their sections, which I'll do for future posts unless they have some significant contribution. Again, all information and videos are taken directly from the candidates' websites, either in part or in whole, unless otherwise noted, with minimal alteration to clarify and streamline information.

Barack Obama
Summarized from Obama's Website

•   President Obama has made protecting the environment a priority, moving America toward energy independence and cleaner air and water, all of which has helped create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the clean energy industry.
• President Obama has enacted the largest expansion of land and water conservation and protected wilderness in a generation in addition to creating the America's Great Outdoors initiative to develop a community-led conservation and recreation agenda for the 21st century
• President Obama is committed to putting an All-of-the-Above Energy Strategy in place to develop every available source of energy in America while ensuring  Americans never have to choose between protecting the environment and strengthening the economy.
• President Obama has announced the opening of public lands for investments in clean energy and has committed his administration to approve projects by the end of 2012 that will increase renewable generation capacity to power 3 million homes as well as have taken major steps to develop offshore wind resources, including the approving country's first ever offshore wind farm which will provide clean electricity to power more than 200,000 homes and taken steps to streamline future offshore wind projects. Obama's administration has also approved the construction of 16 commercial-scale solar facilities, five wind and eight geothermal projects on public lands that are expected to power a further 1.3 million homes and support 12,500 jobs.
• President Obama has made an agreement with auto manufacturers to improve the overall fuel economy of America's automobiles to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, almost double the 27.5 miles per gallon standard that was in place when Obama took office. The Obama administration's groundbreaking standards for cars and light trucks will save American families an average of $8,200 in gas costs per vehicle by 2025, and the standards will also cut vehicles' greenhouse gas pollution in half, reducing a major cause of climate change.
• President Obama has set a 10-year goal for America to develop and deploy cost-effective clean coal technology and to have several commercial demonstration projects running within four years. The Recovery Act invested substantially in carbon capture and sequestration research, including 22 projects across four different areas of carbon capture-and-storage research and development. Under President Obama, America has implemented numerous initiatives to improve miner health and safety, and 2011 saw the second-fewest miner deaths on record.
• Under President Obama's direction, the Environmental Protection Agency has issued the first-ever national standards for mercury emissions and other dangerous toxins  from coal- and oil-fired power plants. These new safeguards are helping to clear our skies, preventing 11,000 premature deaths, 4,700 heart attacks and 130,000 new cases of asthma each year.
• Obama's New Energy for America plan will help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future, save more oil than America currently import the Middle East and Venezulea combined within 10 years, put 1 million plug-in hybrid cars that can get up to 150 miles per gallon on the road by 2015 that we will work to make sure are built in America, create a new $7,000 Tax Credit for purchasing Advanced Vehicles, ensure 25 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2025 and implement an economy-wide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.

Romney's Rebuttal (Summarized From Romney's Website)

• The most active regulation group in the federal government is the Environmental Protection Agency, with Obama's war on carbon dioxide, the most far-reaching environmental regulatory scheme in American history is the highest-profile effort by the EPA, who continue to issue new regulations touching on countless things that continue to drive up costs, hinder business investments and destroy jobs. In August 2011 Cass Sunstein, Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal announced the results of an "unprecedentedly ambitious government-wide review" of regulations that if implemented would result in a total annual savings of approximately $2 billion, small compared to the over $9 billion in new regulatory costs proposed or implemented by the Obama administration.
• The first three years of the Obama administration have witnessed energy and environmental policies that have stifled the domestic energy sector. President Obama and the regulatory bodies under his control have taken measures to limit energy exploration and restrict development in sectors like oil and coal in ways that sap economic performance, curtail growth, and kill jobs. As the Obama administration wages war against oil and coal, it has been spending billions of dollars on alternative energy forms and touting its creation of “green” jobs. But these “green” technologies are typically far too expensive to compete in the marketplace since they generate little profit, which unsurprisingly has failed to create an economic boom.

 Mitt Romney
 Summarized from Romney's Website

• Romney will make efforts to safeguard the environment, but not at the cost of American jobs. The first step will be to stream line regulations to facilitate rapid progress in the development of our domestic reserves of oil and natural gas and allow for further investment in nuclear power. Other steps include creating one-stop shop to streamline permitting process for approval of common activities, implement fast-track procedures for companies with establish safety records to conduct pre-approved activities in pre-approved ares with minimal oversight, ensure environmental laws properly account for cost in regulatory process, edit the Clean Air Act to remove all oversight on carbon dioxide production, Expand NRC capabilities for the approval of alternate nuclear reactor designs and streamline the process to ensure that licensing decisions for reactors on or adjacent to approved sites, using newly approved designs, are complete within two years. 
• According to Romney, America has been blessed with a cornucopia of carbon-based energy resources, an development of them has been a pathway to prosperity in the past and should be in the future, so he'll conduct a comprehensive survey of America's energy reserves, start using America's energy reserves, expand opportunities for resource developers to forge partnerships with neighboring countries, support the construction and fast tracking of pipelines to bring Canadian oil to America, reduce regulation of shale gas development and extraction trough processes like hydraulic fracturing. The failure of windmills and solar plants to turn significant profits also requires the need to move alternative energy funding to basic research utilizing long term, apolitical  funding mechanisms like ARPA-E.

 Obama's Rebuttal (Summarized from Obama's Website)

• Romney's rhetoric that he wants to make America energy independent by 2020 doesn't match his actual policies, which would do nothing to help America achieve that goal. Romney is calling for more drilling and fracking with fewer safeguards. Romney wants to maintain the $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies for oil and gas companies that are making near-record profits, while eliminating a clean energy tax credit that supports tens of thousands of jobs. Romney's plan to "drill, baby, drill" while cutting critical investments in wind, solar and biofuels will do nothing to reduce America's dependence foreign oil and end thousands of jobs across the country. Romney has made it clear that he opposes the wind production tax credit and all incentives for clean energy, which would pull the rug out from under our growing clean energy sector, which supports thousands of jobs across the country.

Conclusion
In summary, Obama wants to back green technologies and reduce America's use of oil, while Romney wants to get as much business going as possible with as few restrictions as possible. Well, maybe this time we'll see a less one-sided result from the superheroes on Friday.
~James