The U.S. Chamber’s Energy Institute is calling President Obama’s energy goals an unrealistic approach that will increase energy costs for the American people.
“The fundamental problem with the administration’s approach on energy is that it picks winners and losers,” said Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the Energy Institute. “Raising taxes on the industry that fuels our lives shows a profound detachment from our energy and economic reality.”
Obama laid out his energy proposal in the State of the Union Tuesday night. He called for 80 percent of the nation’s energy consumption to come from clean energy sources by 2035. The president also set the goal of having one million electric vehicles on the roads by 2015.
But because Obama pledged to call on Congress to eliminate billions of dollars of subsidies for the oil industry to pay for investment in clean energy technology, Harbert criticized the 80 percent goal.
“This proposal, along with the effort to stall both current and future development of energy in the Gulf of Mexico & Alaska, will harm our economy and make us even more dependent on foreign oil,” she said.
It’s too soon to tell whether a broad energy bill that encompasses these goals would make it through Congress. Last year a cap-and-trade bill with similar goals died in the Senate.
“We strongly support the development of clean energy technologies and have called for increasing research and development,” said Harbert. “Unfortunately, the administration’s clean energy proposal is wholly unrealistic and is more about rhetoric than reality.
She went on to say that the plan is unfeasible because it would require a drastic increase in the use of renewable energy like nuclear power while at the same time reduce the use of the cheapest and most widely available energy resource – coal.