Dr. David Moylan, Schuylkill County candidate for the 17th Congressional District, said Monday that many factors contribute to an energy policy that's currently off track.

For instance, "overregulation is a big obstacle."Policies of the Environmental Protection Agency are a concern, he said, when it comes to fostering a healthy energy policy. Its philosophy about coal contributes to a detrimental policy."EPA is regulating carbon dioxide as if it was a poison," said Moylan.Carbon dioxide is naturally occurring chemical compound. Vegetation uses carbon dioxide and water to produce oxygen.Carbon dioxide is also produced when carbon is burned, and while some cite increases in its release into the atmosphere and then relate those increases to global warming, Moylan said statistics should be examined."There has been no global warming in the last 17 years and nine months despite the rise."Plus, financial incentives need to be examined pertaining to energy, he said."My policy would be to study taxation on energy and come up with something to keep us competitive."One of the ideas offered at the Heartland Institute's ninth International Conference on Climate Change last July in Las Vegas, hosted by the Heartland Institute, is to dismantle the EPA and replace it with a Committee of the Whole.Moylan outlined how that would be accomplished.The activities of EPA's 14 federal offices would be transferred to Topeka, Kansas, the geographic center of the U.S. Along with the move, the staff would be reduced from 15,000 employees to 300.The plan also calls for six delegates from each state.EPA's research laboratories would continue to perform research, but state-funded research would compete with federal labs in order to keep the laboratories above board.