Conservative group pushes GOP to roll back Obama climate work

The Hill reports on CEI's energy and enviornment priorities for the 115th Congress. 

The Competitive Enterprise Institute — from which President-elect Donald Trump tapped his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition chief — on Thursday said the GOP-controlled government taking power next year should pursue an aggressive deregulation agenda domestically and pull the United States out of international climate change work.

In a memo outlining the group’s 2017 agenda, CEI’s energy team said lawmakers should repeal EPA rules and regulatory power, end the use of the “social cost of carbon," a metric federal departments use to assess impacts on the climate, halt the federal renewable fuels mandate and oppose any proposal to tax carbon emissions.

The U.S., the group said, should pull out of the Paris climate agreement reached last year and stop federal funding for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the underlying global climate treaty.

“Increasing the affordability of both U.S. and global energy is an important economic and humanitarian objective,” CEI officials wrote in their report. “Policymakers heeding the time-honored healer’s maxim, ‘First, do no harm,’ should reject policies to tax and regulate away mankind’s access to affordable energy.”

Read the full article at The Hill.