Mitt Romney's 'energy independence' plan kowtows to fossil-fuel foolery. No mention of climate

The long-awaited (cough-cough) comprehensive energy plan from presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney will be officially announced today. Comprehensive in name only. While giving a brief mention to renewables, the plan could have been crafted in the boardroom of Exxon-Mobil or any other oil company. Perhaps "could have been" is being too kind. It's hard to imagine that what Vice President Dick Cheney and the energy companies cooked up in their secret get-together in early 2001 could be any more favorable to the oil giants and coal companies.

Given who is on Romney's energy advisory team, and given what Romney has been saying since his campaign began, nothing in the plan is a surprise except, perhaps, for the brazenness of its deep bow to carbon-based fuel companies.

The plan calls for North American energy independence by 2020 and would get there by opening up more off-shore land to oil and gas leases, giving states authority over on-shore energy development on public land, getting rid of regulations that hamper energy development (read: environmental regulations), shifting the cost of seismic surveys to the taxpayers to determine the best areas to drill, leaving renewables development to the private sector (read: no subsidies for wind, solar and geothermal) while continuing subsidies and favored treatment for fossil fuels.

Not once is the word, "climate," mentioned. But the plan would, Team Romney claims, create three million new jobs.

While renewables would get bupkis, the big five oil giants alone would get another $2.3 billion annually in tax breaks. The job loss in the renewables industry could hit 37,000.

Putting a wrench into environmental rules would not only assist oil operations but give an boost to the coal industry as well. The prospect of court-approved regulations of emissions, including  carbon dioxide emissions, by the Environmental Protection Agency have been under attack from right-wingers and some coal-state Democrats for years. Since 2001, only 23 of the proposed 249 new coal-fired power plants have come on line. That has environmentalists cheering since coal plants, which provide about 40 percent of the nation's electricity, are a leading source of carbon-dioxide emissions that are a key factor driving global warming.

While the states would be given authority to handle oil and gas leasing, the siting of new nuclear power plants would get fast-track approval by the federal government under the Romney plan.

Naturally, the Keystone XL pipeline to carry tar-sands oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast would be approved'on Day One of his presidency, as Romney as previously said'presumably regardless of what state authorities, like those in Nebraska, think about the latest route.

So, while state authority would be given the go-ahead when that helps industry, federal authority would prevail where that best would provide for industry's needs. It's the perfect Romney approach to everything: having things both ways.

You can see the 21-page plan at Grist. As Philip Bump there notes, the document is mostly quotations from newspapers and other sources rather than any details on precisely how this North American independence will be achieved.

One thing it would certainly require is a massive ramp-up, potentially a doubling, of oil production in seven years and an increase in new coal-fired power plants. Given Romney's view that producers of wind and solar electricity should not receive tax credits, it's likely that those sources would provide far less of any energy independence that would be achieved by 2020.

Calling the plan backward-thinking is far too generous. It's the culmination, among other things, of 20 years of climate-change denial, taking exactly the opposite direction from where we should be going.

As Bump writes, "There is literally nothing in his proposal that would cause a single sleepless night for executives at Shell or Chevron." Which goes to show you how little they care, how little Mitt Romney cares, about the world they will leave their children and grandchildren.

Romney's approach to energy is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's 31 years ago. Except we didn't have 395 parts per million CO₂ in the atmosphere then.