Tweet

In a meeting with Tea Party activists, former Republican Speaker of the House and potential 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was nothing more than “a job-killing regulatory engine of higher energy prices.” Gingrich was discussing with the group the best way to go about lowering gas and heating oil prices for American consumers, both of which he blamed squarely on President Obama. He also pitched the idea that the United States needed to lift bans on unconventional oil extraction, ignoring the potential consequences of that particular fuel source.

This is not the first time that Gingrich has seized an opportunity to go after the EPA. Back in January, he told the Associated Press that, if president, he would completely abolish the agency. In its place, he would create a new organization that works with businesses to help draft “friendly” environmental policies. Gingrich went on to describe how he views the EPA: “What you have is a very expensive bureaucracy that across the board makes it harder to solve problems, slows down the development of new innovations.”

Tweet

Just how ambitious will Barack Obama’s clean energy package be? During the campaign, he pledged to invest $150 billion in new projects over the next decade and create 5 million well-paying green-collar jobs.

While there was some trepidation about whether Obama, facing an ever-worsening economic crisis, would keep his word, the release of the long-awaited $825 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Bill of 2009 last week seems to have quelled most doubts.

To no one’s surprise, a large chunk of the stimulus – over $90 billion – will go to funding “shovel-ready” transportation and public infrastructure projects.

Thirty-two billion dollars will be used to create a “smart electricity grid” to cut waste, and over $20 billion will be devoted to renewable energy tax cuts and credits for research and development on energy efficiency and energy conservation.

Tweet

President Bush is trying hard to polish his image on global warming, but buried in his fancy talk about setting long-term goals for reducing emissions by mid- 2008, the U.S. president’s core message is still the same – don’t dare mess with economic growth.

Instead of binding limits on greenhouse-gas emissions, favored by the United Nations and many countries, he’s still pushing a voluntary approach on climate change and lobbying some of the world’s biggest polluters to rally behind him.