For Immediate Release
Thursday
January 28, 2010
Contact Information:
Steve Higley 202-552-8455
Charles T. Drevna: 'Avoid Counterproductive Policies'
There is little doubt that the Obama Administration looked at the odds of success this year for health care reform and a cap-and-trade climate bill and reconfigured its legislative priorities. Our industry is cautiously optimistic over the President’s decision to not aggressively articulate a desire for mandatory carbon controls in his state of the union speech. He alluded to House-passed climate legislation, but focused primarily on incentives for new technology and achieving greater efficiencies through innovation, something our member businesses excel at daily. We applaud that approach because it positively engages domestic industry across the board rather than singling out one sector to the benefit of another. It also provides the United States with a real opportunity to lead the world both economically and environmentally by driving the development of technology that we can share with other nations as opposed to following the old command-and-control policy that has essentially failed in Europe and has delivered no meaningful environmental benefit.
Where the President can truly reach a strong and immediate consensus is in the area of expanding domestic energy production, as he stated last evening. The technology to safely explore for energy offshore is far ahead of where opponents to increased exploration suggest it is. We applaud the President for being open to increasing oil production within our own borders, but caution that other policy proposals for climate change, taxation, and improving air quality must not work against this objective.
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NPRA members include more than 450 companies, including virtually all American refiners and petrochemical manufacturers. Our members supply consumers with a wide variety of products and services used daily in their homes and businesses. These products include gasoline, diesel fuel, home heating oil, jet fuel, lubricants and the chemicals that serve as “building blocks” in making everything from plastics to clothing to medicine to computers.