Press Releases

In response to President Obama’s State of the Union address before Congress, Western Caucus Chairman U.S. Representative Cynthia Lummis issued the following statement:

“In the open west we love our clean water, clean air, and pristine land far more than those federal bureaucrats deluded into thinking they need to protect it from us ever could.  We understand how to nurture and build up our natural resources.  And we know how to responsibly develop our energy resources to produce the electricity that families depend on when they flip a light switch, cook a meal, or turn on their water tap.

“This past weekend, thanks in part to the oil boom on private land and American entrepreneurship, I filled my pickup for $40 and last year it cost me $80.  If you’re like me, this is $40 to spend somewhere else.  This is no thanks to the President who has kept federal land oil and gas leases at an all-time low.  Middle class and working poor Americans are the ones suffering the most under the Obama administration.

“As expected in his 2015 State of the Union address, President Obama again tried to use the specter of climate change to scare the American people into thinking we can sustain our standard of living without fossil fuels or even renewables like hydro-power.  We need the dependability of coal-fire, hydro-power, and nuclear power as the base for our electric generation.  If not, we will face the same brownouts and troubles that our friends in Europe have already experienced and which we got a taste of last winter.

“The EPA itself has admitted that its own Clean Power Plan will have little to no impact on the global emissions—making it federal regulation for its own sake—that poor and middle-class Americans will be forced to foot the bill for.

“President Obama trumpets the exponential growth of energy production we have seen over the past few years as a victory due to his policy.  But it has been in spite of his policy, with the growth occurring on private lands while energy production on federal lands remains mired in regulation, backlog, and red tape.

“We need to focus on streamlining permitting processes and opening proper federal lands to responsible energy production to ensure that electricity prices, especially for middle and lower income Americans, are affordable and that America’s power generation is stable.”