Poof:
A conservative group is pushing the next Congress to take several steps to undo President Obama’s climate work.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute ... on Thursday said the GOP-controlled government taking power next year should pursue an aggressive deregulation agenda domestically and pull the United States out of international climate change work.
In a memo outlining the group’s 2017 agenda, CEI’s energy team said lawmakers should repeal EPA rules and regulatory power, end the use of the “social cost of carbon," a metric federal departments use to assess impacts on the climate, halt the federal renewable fuels mandate and oppose any proposal to tax carbon emissions.
The U.S., the group said, should pull out of the Paris climate agreement reached last year and stop federal funding for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the underlying global climate treaty.
“Increasing the affordability of both U.S. and global energy is an important economic and humanitarian objective,” CEI officials wrote in their report. “Policymakers heeding the time-honored healer’s maxim, ‘First, do no harm,’ should reject policies to tax and regulate away mankind’s access to affordable energy.”
via thehill.com
This proposal makes a lot of sense unless you reckon that energy use does its own harm (e.g., negative health effects). If you suggest that the EPA should go away and the energy market should be completely free (except for subsidies, of course) then you put a zero value on health and the environment.
