Sunday, October 16, 2011

Rick Perry-Getting to know the candidates


Presidential candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry released his economic plan Friday, promising that an energy-centric program to expand offshore drilling and domestic oil and gas exploration would create 1.2 million jobs.

Perry, who spoke at a suburban Pittsburgh steel mill before a hard hat-wearing crowd, is building on the Republican Party's "drill, baby, drill" mantra, He'd move to open federal lands to drilling, including Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and would curtail the Environmental Protection Agency's regulatory powers....

Struggling to seize a message of his own, Perry turned to the energy sector — familiar ground to any energy state lawmaker — as the basis for his jobs program....

Saying the premise for his plan is "Make what Americans buy, buy what Americans make and sell it to the world," Perry predicted that, "We are standing atop the next American economic boom ... energy."

"The quickest way to give our economy a shot in the arm is to deploy American ingenuity to tap American energy. But we can only do that if environmental bureaucrats are told to stand down," he said.

"America has proven but untapped supplies of natural gas, oil and coal. America is the Saudi Arabia of coal, with 25 percent of the world's supply. Our country contains up to 134 billion barrels of oil and nearly 1.2 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas...."

Perry said he'd open up federal and private lands for exploration in states such as Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Colorado and Utah. The Western states could produce 1.3 million barrels of oil per day by 2020, he said, adding that they also contain 87 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Perry's harshest criticism was for the EPA. He said he'd stop "the EPA's draconian measures related to the regulation of greenhouse gases" and return air and water oversight to the states, "rather than imposing one-size-fits-all federal rules...."

Perry plans to unveil the second part of his economic program Oct. 25 in a speech focused on overhauling taxes.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

He's in favor of college grants to children of illegal immigrants. That was a fatal mistake.