WASHINGTON – IER Senior Vice President Dan Kish issued the following statement after the White House released their latest “Climate Assessment” report:

“This climate report bears a strong resemblance to the IPCC report, only with less science and more rhetoric. This IPCC ‘mini-me’ is just another attempt to justify more government intervention in Americans’ lives and more attacks on affordable energy and economic growth.  Americans have been hoping that in this so-called ‘year of action’, President Obama was talking about action on creating jobs. This report, combined with his inaction on Keystone XL, shows he is using his pen and his phone to kill more jobs.

“Throughout his entire presidency, Obama has promoted polices that have discouraged the use of our vast energy resources, including blocking the Keystone XL pipeline, slowing energy development on government lands and waters, and forcing new restrictions on all forms of energy that Americans have used to become the number one economy in the world. Under this Administration, even cows are not spared as emission sources that must be controlled in Washington.

“We are told that this is all done to combat global warming. But the President’s agenda is not about global warming at all, and the fact that they’ve changed the name of their campaign to increase government intervention to “climate change” is all we need to know. This is their project to put Washington in charge of our energy supplies and our economy. This document is less a look into the climate than it is a scare tactic designed to excuse the President’s agenda of centralizing power in Washington and making energy more expensive and jobs harder to find.

“With this report, the White House has continued its legacy of being one of the least transparent administrations in history. Instead of having an honest and open debate about climate change and energy policy in Congress, where the President’s Cap-and-Tax plan failed, the administration continues to make their decisions behind closed doors. And as has become standard procedure in Obama’s White House, this document is intentionally confusing and misleading. In fact, the original draft was so large and convoluted that it came with a disclaimer that warned against downloading it. The only transparent part of this whole process was finally making John Podesta’s influence in the White House official by bringing him over from the Center for American Progress to head this campaign against American progress.

“None of this should come as a surprise, however, as this administration has always shown a willingness to bypass Congress, the American people, and common sense in the name of their climate action agenda. After all, this is the same President who said, ‘there is more than one way to a skin a cat’ after the failure of Cap-and-Tax, and where only yesterday, John Podesta announced that Congress can’t stop the President on his global warming agenda.”

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