Expanding oil and gas exploration, repealing environmental regulations and restructuring the Environmental Protection Agency are some of the cornerstones of Rick Perry?s energy plan.
Also, Newt Gingrich?s.
Continue ReadingAnd Michele Bachmann?s.
The Texas governor?s energy platform, unveiled in a speech Friday morning, is stirring up calls of copycat from the Republican presidential field.
A key part of Perry?s 41-page plan deals with dramatically transforming the EPA into an agency that largely serves as a referee between states. Perry?s EPA wouldn?t issue any technology standards or emissions limits, and it would operate with 40 percent of its current budget.
?The EPA?s reach must be narrowly construed to prevent a return to our current regulatory challenges in the future,? Perry?s plan states. ?By returning more authority to the states, we can empower state regulators that are more in tune with the specific needs, challenges, and solutions that work best for their particular state.?
However, Perry?s plan is similar to one detailed by Gingrich in January to replace the EPA with an ?Environmental Solutions Agency.?
?We need to have an agency that is first of all limited, but cooperates with the 50 states,? Gingrich said at the time. ?The EPA is based on bureaucrats centered in Washington issuing regulations and litigation and basically opposing things.?
?Imitation is the finest form of flattery,? Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond told POLITICO in an email.
Of course, disliking the EPA isn?t anything new among the GOP candidates. But Perry?s plan is more specific than that, a former aide said.
?Replacing it ? particularly with something that?s more state-based, that sees businesses and companies more as a partner than as an adversary ? I mean, that?s essentially taken directly out of what Newt was saying in January in Iowa and then again at his CPAC speech one month later,? the aide said.
Bachmann?s campaign, meanwhile, took a more passive-aggressive route.
?I appreciate you endorsing my energy ideas,? the Minnesota congresswoman said in a statement. ?Your plan is exactly what I have been talking about since I entered the race in June.?
Her short statement implies his plan is essentially lifted wholesale from her own.
Bachmann floated her jobs ?blueprint? ? which addressed, among other things, energy production ? earlier this week, ahead of the New Hampshire debate on economic issues.
According to Bachmann?s plan, increasing energy production on federal lands by rolling back environmental regulations would create 1.4 million jobs ? 150,000 more than the estimate in Perry?s plan.
?We have to abandon the parochial and political energy policies of the past and install a comprehensive energy plan that not only reduces our reliance on unfriendly foreign regimes, but also creates millions of American jobs and generates increased tax revenues,? Bachmann wrote in her plan.
Bachmann?s blueprint is limited to 11 points and is less detailed than Perry?s plan, which includes three pages of citations.
Parts of Perry?s plan are original proposals. For example, he proposes instituting a separate court specializing in energy and environmental issues to speed up litigation.
No major candidate appears to have made a similar proposal at the federal level, although various states and localities, including Vermont and Cobb County, Ga., already use such courts.
This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 6:18 p.m. on October 14, 2011.
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