Issue Position: Energy Independence

Issue Position

Energy independence is essential to America's long term financial stability and national security. We can accomplish this with tax incentives for individuals and businesses that encourage these and other forms of Alternative Energy and Conservation:

-Promoting the development of alternatively fueled vehicles such as hydrogen cells

-Developing and expanding alternative technologies such as as solar, wind, and clean coal

-Increasing fuel standards and promoting the use of hybrid vehicles

For Louisiana, the benefits for expanded off shore drilling are more than just lowering the price at the gas pump. Louisiana benefits because:

-Louisiana companies and workers will build the oil rigs, and the boats that service them.

-Louisiana companies and workers will build and maintain the new pipelines that transport the petroleum

-Expanded natural gas supplies lower production costs of Louisiana chemical plants, preserving these jobs producing fertilizers, plastics, and other natural gas products.

Increasing our supply of oil will lower prices at the pump. We can accomplish this by:

-Lifting the bans on domestic offshore drilling and extracting oil from shale in the Western United States

-Opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and other potential energy sources to exploration and drilling

-Reducing the costly, complicated, and time-consuming maze of federal regulatory requirements affecting refineries.

-Increasing the capacity of existing refineries by reducing the costly federal regulations that affect them

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