COMMENTARY | Rick Santorum's sudden rise to frontrunner status in Iowa may have many undecided voters wondering where the Republican presidential candidate stands on the environment.
The image of a soaring bald eagle graces his official campaign logo, but Santorum has used the words "poorly crafted legislation" to define the Endangered Species Act, the very law often credited with saving the iconic species from extinction.
Support for the coal industry runs deep in the former Pennsylvania Senator's blood. He announced his candidacy for president near a coal mine where his grandfather worked as a miner after emigrating to the U.S. from Italy to escape Benito Mussolini's fascist rule. At a New Years Eve campaign rally in Iowa, Santorum made it clear that he would repeal new EPA regulations aimed at cleaning up mercury and toxic air pollution from coal burning power plants.
"One regulation the Obama administration just put in place is a regulation that, according to the utility industry, will require 60 coal fired power plants to be shut down over the next 20 years," he said. "Now, I know they want to get to 20 percent green energy by 2020. I just didn't think they'd get there by cutting out fossil fuel energy, but that's what they're doing."
Santorum also told voters that he would eliminate all energy subsidies, presumably including renewables like wind and solar power, as well as green light the expansion of oil drilling in Alaska and offshore, including in deepwater.
As President, Santorum would approve of the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline. In fact, he views the entire debate over the pipeline as "pandering to radical environmentalists who don't want energy production, who don't want us to burn more carbon."
In June, Santorum described the idea that humans contribute to global warming through the production of carbon emissions as "patently absurd" on the Rush Limbaugh Show. Like all of the 2012 Republican presidential candidates, he opposes cap and trade.
On the whole, Santorum views "radical" environmentalism as, "A religion of its own that's being pushed on the American public."
While Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Ron Paul all want to eliminate the EPA, Santorum takes a slightly more moderate approach. He wants to "eliminate resources for radical job killing approaches at the EPA and refocus its mission on safe and clean water and air and commonsense conservation."
Still, Santorum views his record on the environment as solid. At the aforementioned New Years Eve campaign event in Iowa, he touted his work on a 2006 Senate bill that he says streamlined funding to cleanup "the tremendous amounts of groundwater and other pollution" coming from abandoned coal mines in Eastern states like Pennsylvania and West Virginia."
