Businessman Herman Cain said Saturday in Iowa that if elected president he would make the U.S. energy independent but that his plan to do so was still being developed. “We will have an energy independence strategy because America has the resources to become energy independent. We have enough oil, coal, natural gas, shale oil,” Cain said at the Iowa Faith and Freedom dinner in Des Moines. “We have the resources to become energy independent, and my team is already working on putting that strategy together.”
Cain said the Obama administration had no energy strategy.
He said that the U.S. needs to produce it’s own energy and stop relying on sources “in countries that don’t like us very much.”
“Now the first barrier that people like to say we have is that the EPA won’t let us do that,” Cain said. “Well as president of the United States, I would make sure the EPA has an attitude adjustment. They work for us.”
Asked if he could “reverse one energy policy from the last three years,” Cain said, “I would have allowed the American people to decide what kind of light bulbs to put in their homes.”
Conservatives have railed against coming standards for light bulb efficiency which will effectively ban incandescent bulbs. Those standards are set to go into effect in 2012, but the law that established them was passed in 2007 and was signed by President George W. Bush.
A Republican bill to repeal the efficiency standards failed in the House in July.
