The Heartland Institute boasted this week that the president took some of its advice in writing his first State of the Union speech.
Now, the free-market, anti-climate change group hopes he will listen to it on other recommendations, such as going after liberal West Coast governors who have stalled coal and oil terminals as part of his infrastructure plan.
“The Heartland Institute has been advising many in the administration on climate and energy policy, so we were certainly encouraged and excited the president promoted his pro-energy, pro-America vision in his State of the Union address,” said Tim Huelskamp, president of the Heartland Institute.
Huelskamp said the White House reached out to the group a few weeks ahead of the address to Congress to ask “if we had other suggestions.”
The group suggested that President Trump’s address should be “something outside the partisan box,” such as saying that patients should have the “right to try” life-saving experimental drugs that they are now denied because of the “antiquated drug approval process at the Food and Drug Administration.” The president did just that. Vice President Mike Pence is a big supporter of “right to try” legislation in Congress.
But others in the group hope the president will be just as receptive in taking their advice on energy and hitting back at Democratic resistance to fossil fuels in advancing his export agenda.
“Unfortunately, most of the cities with major ports, including all those along the West Coast, are in Blue states run by Democratic governors,” said H. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow on energy policy at Heartland.
“State recalcitrance should not be allowed to interfere with interstate and international commerce that, constitutionally, is the domain of the federal government,” he added. “These vital states remain stuck in the grips of radical environmental ideologies,” but the “Trump administration, working with Congress, must get new coal, oil, and natural gas export terminals built as part of an infrastructure plan.”
Washington state blocked the opening of a new coal export terminal and earlier this week denied a permit to open a rail line to move oil for export to Asia. Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee denied the permit on Monday, saying he agreed with recommendations from a state energy panel that voted last year to deny the application.
Inslee is also part of a coalition of states supporting the Paris climate change agreement that Trump announced last June that the U.S. would leave.
E. Calvin Beisner, founder of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which is aligned with the group, said he was pleased that Trump did not utter the words “climate change” in the State of the Union.
“Whether climate alarmists here and abroad like it or not, their pet topic has fallen off the agenda for the highest official in the world’s most powerful nation and its biggest economy,” Beiser said.
Trump’s “boosting coal is a clear sign that the federal government’s love affair with diffuse, expensive, unreliable renewable energy sources like wind and solar is over.”
