GOP report highlights 2023 energy, oversight wins over ‘unrealistic climate agenda’

FIRST ON FOX: Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee Republicans are releasing a report highlighting their accomplishments on energy and oversight issues over the course of 2023.

The report — titled ‘Countering Biden’s Radical Green Agenda with Rigorous Oversight & Real Solutions’ — states that EPW Republicans successfully ‘opposed President Biden’s regulatory overreach’ while advancing bipartisan legislation. It further points to wins on streamlining infrastructure development, facilitating energy production and defeating federal environmental regulations.

‘This year, President Biden’s number one target for relentless regulation and executive overreach was American energy, mandating an unrealistic climate agenda that proved costly to American families and harmful to nearly every sector of the economy,’ EPW Committee ranking member Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said in a statement to Fox News Digital.

‘In 2023, EPW Republicans set out to expose the negative impacts of these policies, conduct crucial oversight, and importantly, offer logical, bipartisan energy and environmental alternatives that — unlike the proposals of climate activists in the Biden administration — are actually based in reality,’ she continued. 

The report states that committee Republicans are focused on building an economically prosperous future, ensuring federal agencies follow the law, combating extremist climate policies, exposing waste, fraud, and abuse, and reforming agencies’ management and use of taxpayer resources.

‘President Biden’s radical climate agenda has been rejected time and time again by Democrats and Republicans in Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the American public,’ Moore Capito added. ‘This report tells that story and shows there is a better way, and I’m proud of the continued work of all our members.’

Among the top achievements listed in the report is the Revitalizing the Economy by Simplifying Timelines and Assuring Regulatory Transparency Act, legislation Republicans introduced that would streamline the environmental permitting process for new infrastructure projects. 

As part of that same goal, Republicans on the committee have pursued oversight of the Biden administration’s permitting delays for carbon capture technology.

In addition, the panel’s GOP membership played a key role in ensuring the approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 303-mile natural gas pipeline project that was included in the Fiscal Responsibility Act, the bipartisan debt limit bill President Biden signed in early June.

And six Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions — which are bills that rescind a particular federal rulemaking — that originated from EPW Republicans were passed on a bipartisan basis this year. Those include CRAs revoking regulations to electrify the trucking industry, wildlife protection blocking development and the so-called Waters of the United States rule.

According to the report, Republicans’ actions directly led to pared back Federal Highway Administration regulations and a revised Waters of the United States rule.

The report further highlights oversight efforts targeting the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant regulations cracking down on fossil fuel-fired electricity generation, the ‘Good Neighbor Rule,’ which seeks to phase-down fossil fuel power generation, and particulate matter regulations that could hamper the manufacturing sector with significant new costs.