The plan he laid out in a speech at the United States Steel plant here contained proposals he said would free the nation from reliance on foreign energy and create 1.2 million jobs.
But critics said the plan — much of which tracks a recent proposal by an oil industry trade group — would make little headway toward either goal, and they feared that it would imperil drinking water supplies and hurt the environment.
“My plan will break the grip of dependence we have today on foreign oil from hostile nations like Venezuela and unstable nations in the Middle East to grow jobs and our economy at home,” Mr. Perry said in the speech.
With his popularity slipping in recent polls, Mr. Perry is clearly hoping to shift the recent narrative of his campaign away from a focus on what even he has acknowledged has been a lackluster performance in debates. His attention on the energy issue, a subject he is comfortable with, could be an effort to bolster his credibility among voters and donors.
His energy plan has four parts: use executive decrees to allow new or additional drilling in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico and federal lands in the West; roll back or weaken environmental regulations; dismantle the E.P.A. and replace it with a “scaled-down agency”; and reshape subsidies and tax credits for different parts of the energy industry, in what appears would be a move away from renewable energy.
A major part of his approach, he added, would be to put an end to what he described as the Obama administration’s complicity in allowing bureaucrats to “grind the economy to a halt in pursuit of activist regulations.”
But Mr. Perry did not elaborate on how, specifically, his plan would create 1.2 million new jobs and end dependence on foreign oil. And he made questionable assertions, including one — that the E.P.A. had never found a case of unsafe hydraulic fracturing of natural gas — that was plainly false.
He also called on oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico to be restored to the pace seen before the BP disaster last year, even though drilling activity is already approaching prespill levels and the Interior Department has announced a major new lease sale.
Many of Mr. Perry’s proposals also appeared very similar to — if not drawn from — an industry-financed study that was endorsed last month by the American Petroleum Institute. That study asserted that opening new regions to drilling and taking other steps that were also proposed in Mr. Perry’s speech would create an additional one million jobs in seven years.
A spokesman for Mr. Perry did not respond to an e-mail asking whether the governor’s plan was influenced by the industry proposal. Perry campaign officials have also declined to say who wrote the new energy plan. However, Rayola Dougher, a senior economic advisor at the Petroleum Institute, said institute officials had met with all the Republican presidential candidates.
“We’re very pleased to see them pick up on the potential our industry has to create new oil and gas jobs,” she said.
Ms. Dougher added that if proposals in the institute’s report were enacted, that would increase domestic oil production by 5.8 million barrels a day over projected levels 15 years from now. Currently, the United States imports a little more than nine million barrels a day.
But other experts were sharply critical of Mr. Perry’s proposals. While he promoted the potential of natural gas in the giant rock formation known as the Marcellus Shale to create a quarter-million new jobs, some experts noted that federal researchers recently cut estimates of undiscovered and technically recoverable gas in the shale formation by almost 80 percent — calling into question the reliability of any long-range predictions about the amount of energy available for extraction there.
The Perry proposal “is largely a political gesture to powerful interests,” said Thomas Power, former chairman of the University of Montana economics department and an expert on energy industry employment. “It’s not going to make a dent in the unemployment rate, because the vast majority of people who have those skills are very busy right now pursuing oil and gas.”
“We’ve been through this before — the ‘drill, baby, drill’ routine,” he added.
Dusty Horwitt, senior counsel to the Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy organization, expressed bafflement at the assertion that environmental regulators had crippled the energy industry.
“The E.P.A. is not standing in the way of oil and gas drilling, because they legally have very little power to regulate the industry,” Mr. Horwitt said. The balance between the need to guarantee reliable energy and to protect the nation’s drinking water supplies has already been tilted too far toward oil and gas companies, and the Perry proposal would exacerbate that further, he added.
John M. Broder and Ian Urbina contributed reporting from Washington.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=91ec1a3db9699d0dea887b86b573a2a1
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