Rick Perry's Jobs Plan is a Nightmare for Liberals

**troung** · 16 Oct 11,, 05:03

Rick Perry's Jobs Plan is a Nightmare for Liberals
The Atlantic WireBy John Hudson | The Atlantic Wire – Fri, Oct 14, 2011
Rick Perry's Jobs Plan is a Nightmare for Liberals - Yahoo! News

Rick Perry's jobs-creation plan is a liberal nightmare. On Friday, the Texas governor unveiled his manifesto at a steel plant in Pittsburgh, which promises to generate 1.2 million jobs by expanding oil and gas production and slashing environmental regulations. In other words: drill baby, drill. Since dropping sharply in the polls with the rise of Herman Cain, Perry sort of fell off the liberal radar screen. His “Energizing American Jobs and Security” fixed that! In today's lefty blogosphere, he's the talk of the town. Here's how they're picking apart his plan:
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It will kneecap green energy startups, writes Ezra Klein at The Washington Post. Perry's plan calls for an end to green subsidies. (To be fair, he also calls for an end to gas and oil subsidies too.) But Klein says that still doesn't create an even playing field. "Analysts have argued that fossil-fuel producers would primarily benefit from such a move, since they enjoy all sorts of legacy advantages."
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It's a petroleum pollution plan, fumes Daniel Weiss, senior fellow of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress: "The Perry plan would undo safeguards from deadly smog, acid rain, mercury, and other pollution. And it ignores a clean tech future while returning to a fossil fuel past. It is of little surprise that the Perry Petroleum Pollution Plan would continue to funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to big oil companies through subsidies, while eliminating incentives for American wind and solar companies to grow. The Perry plan should be stamped 'Made By Big Oil.'" The actual words of the plan recommend cutting the EPA budget by "up to 60%" and returning regulatory power to the states.
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Its job-creation numbers are "unrealistic," writes Michael Levi, senior fellow for energy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Levi says 500,000 jobs created is the absolute maximum an energy policy could create by 2030. Of those numbers, about 130,000 would be oil and gas jobs. The problem with Perry's policy is that it assumes he will be "reversing deeply anti-industry Obama policies that don't actually exist (which is not to say that the Obama policies have no flaws), ignore real constraints at the state level, and don't fully account for market dynamics."
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It endangers protected lands, writes Judd Legum at Think Progress. He cites two policies baked into the plan: “We also strongly recommend opening other federal lands with known resources for development, particularly in Alaska, the Atlantic OCS, and our western states. Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) Coastal Plain (1002) alone contains as much as 12 billion barrels of oil and 10 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.” In another part of the plan, it discusses fast-tracking permits for drilling along the Gulf Coast. "“The ﬁrst step towards energy security and job growth is returning immediately to 2007 levels of permitting in the Gulf of Mexico, responsibly making more of the Gulf available for energy production.”

**editec** · 16 Oct 11,, 10:51

Seems to me that as it regards drilling for gas in places like Pennsylvania, the EPA isn't exactly standing in anybody's way.

**JAD_333** · 16 Oct 11,, 18:18

Rick Perry's jobs-creation plan is a liberal nightmare. On Friday, the Texas governor unveiled his manifesto at a steel plant in Pittsburgh, which promises to generate 1.2 million jobs by expanding oil and gas production and slashing environmental regulations.

The same claim is being made in TV ads over the weekend run by the gas and oil industry. It's probably no coincidence. Perry takes credit for creating almost the same number of jobs in Texas in recent years while his opponents say he didn't create the jobs; the gas and oil industry created most of them. What the critics seem to be missing is that job creation is as much about fostering business-friendly conditions at the state level as it is about using Federal stimulus money to prop up companies.

The way Perry would add those 1.2 million jobs would be to speed up recovery from the BP Gulf oil spill and loosen the administration's go-slow policy on issuing new drilling permits.

Chairman Hastings Statement on Lingering Impacts a Year After President Obama’s Official Gulf Moratorium Lifted

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 12, 2011 - Click to enlarge image House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (WA-04) today delivered the following statement at the Full Committee oversight hearing on “One Year after President Obama’s Gulf of Mexico 6-Month Moratorium Lifted: Examining the Lingering Impacts on Jobs, Energy Production and Local Economies.”

“In May 2010, shortly after the tragic Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, the Obama Administration placed a moratorium on all deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. This official moratorium lasted for nearly six months and was lifted on October 12, 2010 – exactly one year ago today.

This official moratorium, unfortunately, was followed by a de facto moratorium that still did not allow businesses and their employees to return to work until the first permits were issued in February of this year. The Obama Administration’s inability, or refusal, to issue permits in a timely and efficient manner after the official moratorium was lifted resulted in lost jobs and significant economic pain.

More at.. Chairman Hastings Statement on Lingering Impacts a Year After President Obama

**RollingWave** · 17 Oct 11,, 03:45

Given the state of the US economy, this seems like a decent approach, the US have the whole chain as well anyway, so they have much less to worry about resource busts then other resource economy.

In an somewhat unrelated note, some 10 years ago I saw a bunch of amature comedians perform an act (Their day job are almost all politics related) where they sang the Sound of Music (Climb Every Mountain) as Drill Every Mountain.