Now that President-elect Donald Trump has ended the long Biden-Harris nightmare and prevented what would have amounted to a fourth Obama administration, it’s time to rebuild America’s economy and national security. That starts with energy and regulatory policy.
America must reverse disastrous policies that started during the Clinton administration, including attacking our domestic energy industry in hopes of appeasing radical greens and their climate agenda, exporting the manufacture of vital goods to Communist China, and making our country dependent on “green energy” technology imported from China. It won’t be as easy as simply issuing executive orders, although that is an important starting place.
Trump will undoubtedly make clear on day one that the self-destructive war against fossil fuels is over. This means that regulators at federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Interior, Department of Energy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and others will be instructed to stop mindlessly blocking coal, oil, and gas production without justification. They should be instructed in no uncertain terms to expedite energy projects consistent with common sense and laws already on the books.
But behind the policy directive are the nitty-gritty details. To help Trump, his new administration, and the new Congress manage these challenges, my colleagues and I, representing hundreds of years of experience on energy and environment issues, have put together a 10-point road map to guide the needed policy changes. Many say they care about the environment, but few have spent as much blood, sweat, and tears over the decades as we have learning about and working on it.
Our road map aims to get the United States out of the Paris climate treaty once and for all. We need to end California’s unconstitutional ability to set environmental standards for the country, especially with respect to cars and trucks. The massively wasteful, trillion-dollar Green New Deal spending enabled by the Inflation Reduction Act must be stopped.
The federal government must return to the legally mandated schedule of coal, oil, and gas leasing on public lands. The Biden administration has illegally stopped this leasing activity in defiance of federal court rulings. Trump should roll back the Obama-Biden war-on-coal regulations that have made it unnecessarily expensive to burn coal for electricity.
An old political axiom holds that personnel is policy. Trump administration appointees must affirm that they are ideologically on board with the Trump energy agenda. Legally required science and technical advisory boards should be restaffed with individuals philosophically in line with the MAGA energy agenda. And all of them must be capable and willing to expedite it in the face of anticipated resistance from the supporters of the climate hoax agenda, “green energy” subsidy-seekers, rogue blue states, and Communist China and its many agents of influence in the United States.
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Trump should end the profusion of litigation against controversial Biden-Harris administration rules and actions by agreeing to repeal them. He should then follow up by establishing standards for conducting sound scientific and economic analyses. Regulatory agency actions should be reviewed and brought into constitutional agreement with what Congress has authorized, per recent Supreme Court decisions.
Regulatory overreach spanning 40 years has harmed the economy and national security. The Biden-Harris administration has driven our country to the edge of disaster. There is a lot to fix. Let’s get on it.
Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) is a senior policy fellow at E&E Legal and a former EPA transition adviser for the Trump administration.