Energy Platform Comparisons

What follows are quotations from the platforms of the Democrat and Republican parties relating directly to energy issues.

Emphasis has been added, but no changes to words have been made. Each statement is a direct quote.

These platforms are dramatically different.

There is a clear choice between the Democrat party’s energy policies, and those of the Republican party. Except for highlighting differences, the platforms speak for themselves.

Democrat Platform

Democrats share a deep commitment to tackling the climate challenge; creating millions of good-paying middle class jobs; reducing greenhouse gas emissions more than 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050.

We believe America must be running entirely on clean energy by mid-century.

We are committed to getting 50 percent of our electricity from clean energy sources within a decade, with half a billion solar panels installed within four years and enough renewable energy to power every home in the country.

We will cut energy waste in American homes, schools, hospitals, and offices through energy efficient improvements; modernize our electric grid; and make American manufacturing the cleanest and most efficient in the world.

We will transform American transportation by reducing oil consumption through cleaner fuels, vehicle electrification, increasing the fuel efficiency of cars, boilers, ships, and trucks.

Democrats believe the tax code must reflect our commitment to a clean energy future by eliminating special tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuel companies as well as defending and extending tax incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy.

Democrats believe that carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases should be priced to reflect their negative externalities, and to accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy and help meet our climate goals.

Democrats are committed to defending, implementing, and extending smart pollution and efficiency standards, including the Clean Power Plan, fuel economy standards for automobiles and heavy-duty vehicles, building codes and appliance standards. We are also committed to expanding clean energy research and development.

Democrats are committed to closing the Halliburton loophole that stripped the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of its ability to regulate hydraulic fracturing, and ensuring tough safeguards are in place, including Safe Drinking Water Act provisions, to protect local water supplies.

We believe hydraulic fracturing should not take place where states and local communities oppose it.

We will streamline federal permitting to accelerate the construction of new transmission lines to get low-cost renewable energy to market, and incentivize wind, solar, and other renewable energy over the development of new natural gas power plants.

The impacts of climate change will also disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities, tribal nations, and Alaska Native villages — all of which suffer the worst losses during extreme weather and have the fewest resources to prepare. Simply put, this is environmental racism.

The fight against climate change must not leave any community out or behind — including the coal communities who kept America’s lights on for generations. Democrats will fight to make sure these workers and their families get the benefits they have earned and the respect they deserve …

All corporations owe it to their shareholders to fully analyze and disclose the risks they face, including climate risk.

Democrats also respectfully request the Department of Justice to investigate allegations of corporate fraud on the part of fossil fuel companies accused of misleading shareholders and the public on the scientific reality of climate change.

We oppose drilling in the Arctic and off the Atlantic coast, and believe we need to reform fossil fuel leasing on public lands. We will phase down extraction of fossil fuels from our public lands, starting with the most polluting sources …

Democrats will work to expand the amount of renewable energy production on federal lands and waters, from wind in Wyoming to solar in Nevada.

We believe that in order to be effective in keeping our air and water clean and combating climate change, we must enlist farmers as partners in promoting conservation and stewardship.

Republican Platform

The EPA’s Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule, issued jointly with the Army Corps of Engineers, is a travesty. It extends the government’s jurisdiction over navigable waters into the micro-management of puddles and ditches on farms, ranches, and other privately-held property. Ditches, dry creek beds, stock ponds, prairie potholes, and other non-navigable wet areas are already regulated by the states.

Unelected bureaucrats must be stopped from furthering the Democratic Party’s political agenda through regulatory demands forced upon citizens and businesses beyond that which is required by law.

We support the opening of public lands and the outer continental shelf to exploration and responsible production, even if these resources will not be immediately developed.

Because we believe states can best promote economic growth while protecting the environment, Congress should give authority to state regulators to manage energy resources on federally controlled public lands within their respective borders.

Keeping energy in the earth will keep jobs out of reach of those who need them most. For low-income Americans, expensive energy means colder homes in the winter and hotter homes in the summer, less mobility in employment, and higher food prices.

Clean Power Plan — the centerpiece of the President’s war on coal — has been stayed by the Supreme Court. We will do away with it altogether.

The taxpayers will not soon forget the current Administration’s subsidies to companies that went bankrupt without producing a kilowatt of energy. The same Administration now requires the Department of Defense, operating with slashed budgets during a time of expanding conflict, to use its scarce resources to generate 25 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2025.

Climate change is far from this nation’s most pressing national security issue.

We support the development of all forms of energy that are marketable in a free economy without subsidies, including coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, and hydropower.

A federal judge has struck down the BLM’s rule on hydraulic fracturing and we support upholding this decision.

We will end the Administration’s disregard of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act with respect to the long-term storage of nuclear waste.

We encourage the cost-effective development of renewable energy sources — wind, solar, biomass, biofuel, geothermal, and tidal energy — by private capital.

The United States is overwhelmingly dependent on China and other nations for rare earth and other hardrock minerals. … We support expediting the permitting process for mineral production on public lands.

We support lifting restrictions to allow responsible development of nuclear energy, including research into alternative processes like thorium nuclear energy.

We oppose any carbon tax.

American energy producers should be free to export their product to foreign markets.

We remain committed to aggressively expanding trade opportunities and opening new markets for American energy through multilateral and bilateral agreements, whether current, pending, or negotiated in the future.

Energy is both an economic and national security issue. We support the enactment of policies to increase domestic energy production, including production on public lands, to counter market manipulation by OPEC and other nationally owned oil companies. This will reduce America’s vulnerability to energy price volatility.

We propose to shift responsibility for environmental regulation from the federal bureaucracy to the states and to transform the EPA into an independent bipartisan commission, similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with structural safeguards against politicized science.

We will strictly limit congressional delegation of rule-making authority, and require that citizens be compensated for regulatory takings.

We will put an end to the legal practice known as “sue and settle”, in which environmental groups sue federal agencies whose officials are complicit in the litigation so that, with the taxpayers excluded, both parties can reach agreement behind closed doors.

We will likewise forbid the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide, something never envisioned when Congress passed the Clean Air Act.

Congress shall immediately pass universal legislation providing for a timely and orderly mechanism requiring the federal government to convey certain federally controlled public lands to states.

Information concerning a changing climate, especially projections into the long-range future, must be based on dispassionate analysis of hard data.

We reject the agendas of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, which represent only the personal commitments of their signatories; no such agreement can be binding upon the United States until it is submitted to and ratified by the Senate.

We demand an immediate halt to U.S. funding for the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in accordance with the 1994 Foreign Relations Authorization Act.

Closing comment:

Climate change is at the core of the differences between the two visions for our energy future, with the Democrat platform fully committed to the CO2 hypothesis.

The Democrat platform confirms this by saying:

“Our generation must lead the fight against climate change and we applaud President Obama’s leadership in forging the historic Paris climate change agreement. We will not only meet the goals we set in Paris, we will seek to exceed them and push other countries to do the same by slashing carbon pollution and rapidly driving down emissions of potent greenhouse gases like hydrofluorocarbons.”

The entire platforms can be read by using these links.

Democrat 2016 Platform http://bit.ly/2akcEcg
Republican 2016 Platform http://bit.ly/2ayM38z

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Nothing to Fear explains why CO2 isn’t to be feared. Chapter 15, An Alternative Hypothesis, describes Dr. Svensmark’s hypothesis on cosmic rays.

Nothing to Fear is available from Amazon and some independent book sellers.

Link to Amazon: http://amzn.to/1miBhXy

Book Cover, Nothing to Fear

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