The newly released American Energy Act, the Republican alternative to the Democrats' American Clean Energy and Security Act, has clambered aboard the denialist bandwagon on climate change. The GOP plan for controlling greenhouse gases? Don't.
The proposed legislation - which contains the usual modest nod Republicans have for some years been making in the direction of renewable energy sources - is at its heart a subsidy-and-tax-break-laden fast-tracking of off-shore drilling, protected lands drilling, oil-shale projects, "clean"-coal projects, coal-to-liquid projects and a streamlined doubling of the number of U.S. nuclear power plants. If it burns or fizzes, they love it. In other words, same old, same old. Dick Cheney could just as well have tapped out this plan on his laptop in the spring of 2001 while the good old boys from the oil giants lounged around in his office dictating the wording.
What the Republicans don't love, as Brad Johnson at Think Progress's Wonk Room pointed out last night, is any control over greenhouse gases. That little tidbit is tucked away in section 502 on page 148 of the the 152-page plan:
Previously, the denialists in and out of Congress have pretty much stuck to the idea that we don't know if the human-caused production of greenhouse gases will have grave environmental consequences. But now it's as if Senator Jim Inhofe has taken over the Republican Party and is saying, we don't care if there are any consequences, we're going to prohibit the government from taking them into consideration.
This is not merely grotesquely myopic. It's vile. And it makes the deeply flawed Democratic ACES plan look positively brilliant by comparison.