Obama’s Groundhog Day Energy Promises

[Geee]

National Review:

The president is clearly in campaign mode. In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, he said, “This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy — a strategy that’s cleaner, cheaper, and full of new jobs.” I applaud the sentiment. Unfortunately, sandwiched between his campaign speeches have been three painful years of failed policies.

It’s like a real-world version of the movie Groundhog Day. Americans keep hearing the same promises for domestic energy production and green jobs, but then they wake up to political pandering and green scandals.

This is the same administration that placed a moratorium on offshore oil drilling, costing the country up to 220,000 barrels of domestic oil per day in 2011, according to estimates from the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency.

 

And who can forget cap-and-trade? The same president who is now proposing increased domestic energy supplies attempted to build an expansive new bureaucracy that, in the president’s own words, was designed to make energy prices “skyrocket.” When cap-and-tax failed, the president shifted gears and regulated what he couldn’t legislate. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has already declared carbon dioxide an air pollutant and has begun the process of expanding its bureaucracy to create onerous new costs for power plants and refiners.

 

This is also the same president who has fallen far short of fulfilling one of his hallmark campaign promises: 5 million new jobs in a “green economy.” Well, do more lawyers count as green jobs? The administration seemed to have rushed DOE to approve the $535 million in loans to Solyndra to build solar panels, despite concerns from Obama’s own economic advisers. When it became clear that Solyndra was in financial trouble, the administration reworked the loan to ensure political cronies who invested additional capital in the company would be repaid before taxpayers.