The Republican Party’s 2016 platform proposes getting rid of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a massive regulatory body and turning it into an “independent bipartisan commission.”
“We propose to shift responsibility for environmental regulation from the federal bureaucracy to the states and to transform the EPA into an independent bipartisan commission, similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with structural safeguards against politicized science,” reads the GOP platform.
Republicans are concerned about EPA’s regulatory overreach and have proposed bills to keep the agency from issuing new regulations on everything from global warming to smog. The GOP platform doubles down on promises made by presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump to get rid of the EPA.
GOP delegates approved the party’s new platform Monday. In terms of energy policy, it stands in stark contrast to the proposed Democrat platform that largely calls for eliminating America’s use of coal, oil and natural gas and subsidizing green power.
“Poverty, not wealth, is the gravest threat to the environment, while steady economic growth brings the technological advances which make environmental progress possible,” reads the GOP platform.
“The environment is too important to be left to radical environmentalists,” the platform reads. “They are using yesterday’s tools to control a future they do not comprehend.”
“The environmental establishment has become a self-serving elite, stuck in the mindset of the 1970s, subordinating the public’s consensus to the goals of the Democratic Party,” the platform reads. “Their approach is based on shoddy science, scare tactics, and centralized command-and-control regulation.”
EPA has been aggressively moving to push out global warming regulations before President Barack Obama leaves office in 2017. A report by the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute found federal regulations cost the U.S. economy more than $1.8 trillion every year — that’s $15,000 per household.
“Over the last eight years, the Administration has triggered an avalanche of regulation that wreaks havoc across our economy and yields minimal environmental benefits,” the GOP platform reads.
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