Jeb Bush Unveils Energy Plan

Jeb Bush is throw­ing his weight be­hind a fa­mil­i­ar set of GOP en­ergy policy goals that he calls vi­tal to his over­all goal, if elec­ted, of roughly doub­ling the na­tion’s an­nu­al eco­nom­ic growth.

The pil­lars of the en­ergy plan he’s un­veil­ing Tues­day in­clude block­ing White House reg­u­la­tions on areas such as frack­ing and power-plant car­bon emis­sions; lift­ing the ban on crude-oil ex­ports and boost­ing nat­ur­al-gas ex­ports; ap­prov­ing the Key­stone XL pipeline; and giv­ing states far more con­trol of en­ergy de­vel­op­ment on fed­er­al lands with­in their bound­ar­ies and fed­er­al wa­ters off their shores.

“With the right policies and lead­er­ship we can, in the near-term, achieve 4% growth and re­store the op­por­tun­ity for every Amer­ic­an to rise. But that will only hap­pen if we re­verse dam­aging fed­er­al en­ergy policies,” Bush says in a post slated for pub­lic­a­tion Tues­day on the blog­ging plat­form Me­di­um.

It comes ahead of wider re­marks Bush will give on en­ergy Tues­day af­ter­noon at Rice En­ergy, an oil-and-gas com­pany based in Pennsylvania, a state that has seen nat­ur­al-gas pro­duc­tion surge in re­cent years thanks to hy­draul­ic frac­tur­ing and ho­ri­zont­al drilling.

Bush’s post, which ar­gues that his plan would cre­ate jobs and boost wages, echoes fa­mil­i­ar GOP and in­dustry cri­tiques of the White House.

Ac­cord­ing to this line of at­tack, the U.S. en­ergy surge of re­cent years—which has made the coun­try the world’s largest com­bined oil and nat­ur­al-gas pro­du­cer—could be even great­er with few­er re­stric­tions, and new Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion rules threaten to de­ter in­vest­ment.

“We have, thus far, be­ne­fit­ted from the En­ergy Re­volu­tion simply be­cause Wash­ing­ton did not have time to quash it, but we will nev­er know how many oth­er in­nov­a­tions have been lost due to over­reg­u­la­tion,” he writes.

Bush, in a pro­pos­al that re­calls Mitt Rom­ney’s en­ergy plat­form, wants to give states power to con­trol de­vel­op­ment in fed­er­al lands and wa­ters. He writes that Alaskans “over­whelm­ingly” want to boost en­ergy de­vel­op­ment, but says Obama has “severely lim­ited” oil-and-gas ex­plor­a­tion.

His post then takes a shot at Hil­lary Clin­ton’s op­pos­i­tion to drilling in Arc­tic wa­ters off Alaska’s coast, call­ing it “even more ex­treme” than Obama’s policies. (Obama has giv­en Roy­al Dutch Shell lim­ited per­mis­sion to drill in Arc­tic wa­ters, but the com­pany pulled the plug Monday.)

Else­where, the Me­di­um post hints at how Bush would ap­proach low-car­bon en­ergy. He writes that he’ll roll out ad­di­tion­al policies in com­ing months to help the U.S also be­come a “su­per­power of en­ergy in­nov­a­tion,” such as great­er fed­er­al fund­ing for “high-pri­or­ity” ba­sic re­search and im­prov­ing na­tion­al labs to help dis­cov­er “game-chan­ging” en­ergy tech­no­lo­gies.

“The private sec­tor of­ten un­der­funds re­search that could greatly be­ne­fit so­ci­ety. The gov­ern­ment can cor­rect that,” Bush writes.

But Bush does not fa­vor tax in­cent­ives that have dir­ectly cre­ated wider com­mer­cial de­ploy­ment of re­new­ables like wind and sol­ar en­ergy. Bush has said that he’sagainst tax policies that sup­port oil-and-gas and re­new­ables, and writes in the new post that he wants to “level the play­ing field for all en­ergy sources.”