Rusty Kahrs: Obama blocks U.S. energy future

With his decision to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, President Barack Obama has opened another front in his war on domestic sources of energy.

For the first time in more than a decade, the United States has the opportunity to produce more oil at home than it imports from overseas. This means more American jobs, fewer dollars flowing into the coffers of foreign governments rather than our own and greater energy security. Our government should be doing everything it can to encourage this, not block it.

Yet everywhere we look, the Obama administration and Democrats generally are doing everything they can to reverse it. Despite bipartisan support, the president continues to ignore the merits of the Keystone project and has now rejected it twice for political rather than scientific reasons. Sure, tapping Canadian oil sands would technically qualify as imports. We’ll always have to import some oil. I’d much rather get it from our neighbors to the north, especially since the Chinese will take it if we don’t.

The administration’s policies continue to hamper development of new offshore resources as well. While the president decided recently to open a small area of Alaska, he continues to keep much bigger potential fields off the East Coast off limits.

The lengthy post-Macondo moratorium on drilling in the gulf added to the suffering of residents there and forced several deep-water rigs to leave U.S. waters in search of productive work off other countries’ shores. Those rigs won’t be coming back any time soon. The Interior Department continues to be stingy in approving new drilling permits in shallow and deep waters.

Democrats are also attacking the practice of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” which is the primary reason that oil and natural gas production in the United States has jumped in recent years. Evidence suggests that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency intends to propose onerous regulations that will cripple our ability to extract oil and natural gas from shale rock — with little or no scientific basis. Party leaders and their environmentalist allies are pushing for fracking moratoria in states across the country.

The United States is far from “energy independence,” but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to push in that direction. We can move that way by adopting policies that encourage safe and reliable oil and natural gas production both here in the United States and across the border in Canada.

It’s time for Obama to end his war on domestic energy and put Americans back to work.