Rick Perry: Green jobs or dirty jobs?

Rick Perry sought to shift the spotlight away from Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan by focusing on jobs and energy at the October 18, 2011 CNN Western Republican Presidential Debate.

“Well, here's the nine that we need to get focused on,” said Perry. “And it's not 999, it's not 59. It's that 9 percent unemployment in this country.”

“We've got 300 years of resources right under our feet in this country,” the Texas Governor claimed. “Yet we've got an administration that is blockading our ability to bring that to the surface, whether it's our petroleum, our natural gas, or our coal. And 1.2 million jobs could be put to work.” 



In many ways, Perry’s jobs plan is the polar opposite of the vision offered by Barack Obama during the 2008 election, which focused heavily on creating green jobs by investing in clean energy. It’s a difference Perry highlighted at the debate.

“You have an administration that is killing jobs because they want to move us to a green energy,” he said.

Of course, New Hampshire is not Texas. We don't have much in the way of oil, natural gas or coal. What we do have is green jobs. A Brookings Institute Report published in July found the state added 3,915 “clean jobs” from 2003 to 2010, bringing the total number of clean economy job in the state to 12,886. That's food for thought for any presidential candidate looking to score points with Granite State voters.

Rick Perry talks manufacturing jobs at NH Town Hall

Rick Perry responded to a voter's question on how to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. during an early morning Town Hall Meeting in Hampton, NH. In his response, Perry bashed the EPA and defended his record on the environment as Governor of Texas.

Video and transcript of Perry's remarks: 

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Voter: Governor, when you go to Manchester later today you’ll see a lot of old red brick buildings along the Merrimack River. And if you go any of our towns, you’ll old brick buildings in the middle of the town. And in the old days they used to make things there. All of the things they used to in those buildings are now made in China and Indonesia and Taiwan and places like that. Is there any way you as president can get back those manufacturing jobs from those places back here?

Rick Perry: You just described on the great reasons that the over litigation, over taxation and over regulation in particular, in particular those last two, have driven so many driven so many of our countries – uh companies – off shore.

Just this week, the Chief Executive of Coca-Cola, one the great old venerable companies in this country made the statement that it was easier to do business in China than it was in America. Now think about that statement. That it is easier to do business in a communist country than it is in the United States? What have we let happen to this country?

And what he was talking about was the regulatory side of it. We’ve pushed so many of our businesses off shore because we allowed for activists in some form or fashion – and I would suggest to you that the EPA is one of the worst culprits.

Let me give you a great example. Texas cleaned up its air as well as any other state during the decade of the 2000’s. We reduced ozone down by 27 levels -down by 27 percent. Nitrogen oxide levels down by 58 percent. Those are real pollutants and we cleaned up our air. This is the air that our kids breathe. We did that.

But this federal government, this EPA came in to Texas in January and said, “We’re going to take over your air permitting process because we don’t like the way that you’re doing it,” in essence.

That will mean, at our comptroller’s estimate, the loss of 360,000 jobs. They will leave. They will go off shore.

Listen, we live on the Gulf of Mexico. I understand the importance of being able to drill safely there and making sure that we don’t put our environment in jeopardy. But we know how to do that.

Yes, from time to time there are accidents. But if we’re going to work on the concept of an accident free world, there will be no manufacturing in America anywhere, any time in to the future.

We have to be thoughtful, we’ll use science on how to protect our environment, but we have to get back to drilling for instance. And using our natural resources, whether it’s… it’s… I mean, whatever energy source it is needs to be freed up from over regulation out of Washington, D.C. And then let them compete for the free market.

Now I don’t care if it’s wind or if it’s solar or if it’s clean coal or whether it’s oil and gas. Whatever it may be, America has to get back working. And we’ve gotta get our energy industry as part of that – and a big part of that. Because if we do not, we’re continuing…

$450 billions dollars we send offshore every year to buy energy and a lot of that goes to countries that really don’t like us.