OPINION:
Barack Obama has once more applied the knife to the backs of conventional energy producers, and Hillary Clinton is leading the cheers. The Democrat in the White House and his waiting surrogate for his third term have renewed their commitment to inflicting mortal damage on the nation’s energy industry. As the radical cry, “Leave it in the ground,” grows louder, America can do little to get in the president’s way as his months in the White House dwindle, but not fast enough.
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell dropped a bombshell last week with details of the administration’s five-year blueprint for dealing with oil and gas drilling leases on the Outer Continental Shelf. The administration plans to scrap a plan to open for drilling a large swath of the Atlantic seaboard off Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia for drilling. “When you factor in conflicts with national defense, economic activities such as fishing and tourism, and opposition from many local communities, it simply doesn’t make sense to move forward with any lease sales in the coming five years,” Ms. Jewell says. The project to tap 2.8 billion barrels of oil and 26.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, which would add $200 billion and 280,000 jobs to the U.S. economy, made sense last year, but apparently not now. That’s what doesn’t make sense.
Virginia Democrats, including Gov. Terry McAuliffe and Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, had welcomed the economic prospects the drilling would have brought. Freed by his lame-duck status from the need to please anyone but himself, Mr. Obama is focused on pushing a radical environmental agenda as fast and far as he can in the 10 months he has left in office. That means staying the course as champion of climate change schemes and working the levers of government to dial up pricey renewable energy sources like solar, wind and biofuels, and shutting down the flow of affordable fossil fuels. He wants to be the nation’s first green president.
Hillary Clinton says she is “relieved” by the president’s decision to prevent Atlantic Coast drilling. If she is the first female president, she promises to do Mr. Obama one step better, by imposing a moratorium on extraction of gas, oil and coal on all federal land. “Yeah, that’s a done deal,” she replied to a question about such a ban.
She followed that with an equally jarring promise at a town hall meeting in Columbus, Ohio: “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” The replacement jobs she promises to create in solar and wind energy fields have so far been dependent on government subsidies. The electric power those forms of energy production is more expensive, which will be translated into higher utility bills for the consumer. Hillary never mentions that.
Pulling the plug on Atlantic Coast drilling is part of the Democratic strategy for tipping the playing field to lackluster green industry. It’s a cruel thing to do to the people, who will pay bigger energy bills while their rich inheritance remains locked away underground.
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