National Journal Contrasts Perry And Obama's Energy Plans

Scott Detrow

Recent Stories

Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

October 17, 2011 | 10:40 AM

Getty Images

Texas Governor Rick Perry

One final post on Texas Governor Rick Perry’s Pittsburgh energy speech, from the National Journal.
The NJ focuses on Perry’s promise to create more than a million new jobs, by boosting energy production. The article compares that approach to President Obama’s energy policies, which seek to gain the same job growth through the alternative energy sector.

What’s new about the old proposal is that, just as Obama once framed his proposed cap-and-trade and clean-energy mandates as “green jobs” creators, Perry is now prese
In both cases, it appears that Perry and Obama had an energy plan they wanted to push, and sought to fit it into a message about voter’s top concern: jobs.
”What’s striking is, like Obama, Perry is trying to turn to the energy industry as a job magician. And it’s unclear that that is even remotely the case,” said a former Clinton White House aide who works on energy issues, but asked to speak anonymously in order to be candid. “The only bipartisan thing in energy policy right now is looking for it to magically create jobs.”
It’s not clear how the Perry campaign came up with the 1.2 million jobs number, but energy policy experts say it appears to be drawn from a publicity campaign by the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying arm of the oil industry. For the past year, API has been running ads claiming that opening up U.S. public lands and waters to aggressive drilling would create 1 million jobs.