The president continues to repeat his non-solution solutions, so I’ll continue to repeat this actual solution. Earlier this summer, I wrote about an IHS-CERA study that showed picking up the pace of Gulf Oil permitting could result in 230,000 jobs. Predictably, the administration’s response to the study was not to take its recommendations to heart — but, rather, to criticize the study itself. Bromwich can nitpick the study’s methodology, but it doesn’t change the facts: The BOEMRE has allowed applications to pile up at an inexcusable rate, given the industry’s compliance with new regulations and the nation’s dire need for jobs. Allow this video from the Offshore Marine Service Association to drive that point home:
Nor are these jobs limited to just one area of the country. As this interactive map from API reveals, virtually every state in the nation would benefit.
The potentials in natural gas are also worth noting, as Stephen Moore points out in his excellent WSJ column yesterday.
But you can bet, if the president talks about energy-related jobs at all tonight, he’ll talk about “green jobs.” Never mind that we’re already heavily subsidizing wind and solar. For every two cents of tax subsidies for “Big Oil,” wind and solar get nearly $1. Moore summarizes the situation perfectly:
According to data from the Federal Reserve Board’s Industrial Production Indexes, the oil and gas industry, which the Obama Energy Department loathes, has had more growth in output than any other manufacturing industry in the U.S. from 2005 through 2011. As a reward, the administration is proposing $35 billion in new taxes on the industry to slow it down. Even if we accept the dubious White House claim that all the oil and gas tax write-offs are unwarranted loopholes, a 2011 Congressional Research Service study finds that per unit of electricity produced, for every two cents of tax subsidy to Big Oil, Big Green (wind and solar) get closer to $1 in handouts.
“The environmentalists are for any energy source unless it actually works,” notes Stephen Hayward, an energy expert at the American Enterprise Institute. A few years ago the Democrats were all in favor of natural gas at least as a “bridge” energy source. That abruptly changed when the extent of America’s abundant natural gas resources became fully known and more affordable drilling techniques opened up a superhighway to energy security. The irony of the green movement’s reactionary antifracking crusade is that one of the most important developments in cutting U.S. carbon emissions has come from replacing coal-burning fire plants with natural gas.
So we now have a national energy policy directing our resources away from cheap, efficient and increasingly abundant fuels like coal, oil and natural gas while we channel billions of tax dollars to 500-year-old energy technologies like wind power that can’t possibly scale up to power a modern-day industrial economy. That’s a shame.
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