Environment & Energy

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Current policy on environmental and energy issues is based on often ineffective and counterproductive command-and-control efforts. It also hands too much power to unelected bureaucrats who make decisions well beyond the authority Congress intended.

What is needed is a different approach that respects science, property rights, and markets, and balances real environmental concerns with necessary economic growth. The old way of setting environmental policy, which wrongly assumed that government control was the only institution capable of protecting our natural resources and ensuring a responsible energy supply. Environmental policies that destroy jobs and restrict private land use should be the exception and not the norm, relied upon only when there is no feasible alternative. All science used to justify environmental regulations must be open to public scrutiny.

America’s energy revolution with fracking and other innovative techniques and technologies should be encouraged through sensible environmental and energy regulations. Energy producers have dramatically expanded production on private and some state lands, and should be allowed to do the same on federal lands. Government subsidies to energy producers should be ended – at most government should provide funding to universities and other institutions exploring unconventional energy sources and technologies, and cease providing loans, grants, or other funding to specific energy companies and industries.

The most capable stewards of the environment are not politicians and bureaucrats in Washington DC, or interest groups opposed to economic development, resource extraction, and energy production, but the people closest to the land, those who own it and work on it and benefit most from its responsible use and preservation.