Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., Thursday lit into the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) strategy to “crucify” oil and gas companies, as one EPA official put it. Inhofe termed that strategy a fundamental element of President Barack Obama’s energy policy,
Politico reports.
“Let’s keep in mind, this is all a part of Obama’s war on domestic energy,” the senator said on the “Fox and Friends” program. “He’s the one who said that we have good natural gas, and it’s plentiful and all of that, but we’ve got to stop hydraulic fracturing. This is the war on hydraulic fracturing.”
Inhofe, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, said Wednesday that he’s initiating an inquiry into the EPA official’s comments from 2010. The official was EPA Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz.
“I was in a meeting once, and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting but I’ll go ahead and tell you what I said,” Armendariz said on tape.
“It was kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years . . . So, that’s our general philosophy.”
Obama’s policy is two-faced, Inhofe said. “He’s trying to make the public believe he is for domestic energy and specifically natural gas and oil and coal, but at the same time, he says that they’re going to take over the regulation of the process called hydraulic.”
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