The Obama administration’s policies are undermining the nation’s economic future, Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe told his audience at CPAC Friday.
Inhofe details the costs in his upcoming book “The Greatest Hoax”, which is due out at the end of February.
The Senator has been the environmental movement’s leading critic in Washington and become someone it loves to hate. Inhofe warns that a myriad of regulations have compromised the nation’s economic viability. These range from the Utility MACT regulation that could result in the shuttering of several hundred coal-fired power plants to use of the EPA to impose cap-and-trade through regulation.
“This president has been driving jobs overseas by restricting the energy in this country,” Inhofe tells RedAlert Politics. “All of these environmental things that he has on emissions just cost all that more money, and you can’t be competitive.
“Consequently, if they were successful, we wouldn’t be able to stop them.”
Cap-and-trade affects everyone. According to Inhofe, its costs affect every hospital, church or school in America.
“The EPA admits that you will need more than 30,000 administrators and would cost $31 billion,” Inhofe says. “The crown jewel of overregulation is regulating CO2.”
This over regulation also reduces government revenue because it constrains tax receipts by $50 billion for every 1 percent decrease in economic activity.
Inhofe says the nation currently depends on coal for 50 percent of its energy. The United States also has more coal and natural gas than any other nation.
“If we just do what every other country does and exploit our own resources, we could become completely independent of the Middle East because we could just do it within Mexico, Canada and the United States,” he says. “It we were to do that, it wouldn’t be a matter of years, it would be a matter of weeks before we could become independent.”
