Toomey Reacts To Obama's Energy Agenda

• Scott Detrow
  BioRecent 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.

Pennsylvania’s Republican U.S. Senator, Pat Toomey, said he was “disappointed” by President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. That’s despite the relatively low expectations Toomey said he carried into the speech.
Toomey spoke to reporters during a Tuesday night conference call.
What about Obama’s call for expanded natural gas drilling?
Toomey said he was “encouraged” by Obama’s “apparent embrace of natural gas,” but said the push for more domestic production is negated by Obama’s recent decision to reject an application for the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would have transported oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

Toomey said he also continues to oppose the president’s “insistence on continuing to subsidize forms of energy.”
During tonight’s speech, President Obama announced the Navy will “make one of the largest commitments to clean energy in history” by purchasing enough power generated by alternative sources to “power a quarter of a million homes a year.”
It’s not clear where this energy will come from – NPR News said it’s a mix of solar and renewable power —  but Toomey didn’t like the idea. The “expensive and inefficient energy is a waste of money,” Toomey said.

Editor's Picks