Obama can't be trusted on energy

Ron Arnold:

While trying to figure out what President Obama's combative State of the Union speech added to America's unity, let us ponder a non-presidential event during the last presidential election cycle.

In a 2008 "Meet the Press" interview, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, "I believe in natural gas as a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels." She may have slipped on a banana peel of the mind, or perhaps she really didn't know that natural gas is a fossil fuel. Either way, it was clearly a harmless error not intended to confuse or deceive.

Apply that to the president's Tuesday remarks on energy policy. Harmless error or damaging duplicity? Obama tried to take credit for the current jobs and economic success of the natural gas boom:

"We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly one hundred years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy."

The duplicity lies in the weasel word, "safely." Big Green's minions insist there's no safe way to develop fossil fuels and they comprise a lobbying and regulatory roadblock sufficient to heap mountains of delayed and rejected drilling permits on sites properly leased by oil and gas companies. They have Obama's ear -- and apparently the keyboards of his speechwriters.

The oil and gas industry isn't suffering in silence anymore. The whole industrial sector is furious enough with three years of Obama obstruction and obfuscation to sweep aside the maxim, "Take care not to spit against the wind -- or on your regulator."

Virginia "Gigi" Lazenby, chairman of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, responded to Obama's hubris, saying "the truth behind the veil is that this tremendous broad-based economic and energy security success is largely in spite of this administration's, at times, harshly anti-oil and natural gas policies, not because of them."

Lazenby and everyone else in the industry was still smarting from last week's outrageous Obama duplicity when he agreed with his Jobs Council on Tuesday and said America needs more fossil fuels, yet on Wednesday killed the Keystone XL Canada-to-Gulf of Mexico oil pipeline project, saying America needs to reduce our dependence on oil.

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said, "In rejecting the job-creating Keystone XL pipeline, President Obama today chose to try and save his own job by pandering to his anti-pipeline environmental extremist voting bloc."

...

Obama has lost all credibility on the energy issue.  He is too tied to the anti energy left and their carbon phobias.  The best way to break through these roadblocks is to defeat Obama and the Democrats and get a real all of the above energy policy that does not strangle domestic energy production or pipelines from anywhere.