Elections Have Consequences: The Future of US Energy

President Obama's powerful interlocking network of campaign support organisations has succeeded in making sure that the US President can sit in the White House for another four years. This feat opens the door for a great deal of new regulation which has been held back until after the US elections.

President Obama has spent the past year punting on a slew of job-killing EPA regulations that will destroy millions of American jobs and cause energy prices to skyrocket even more,” Senator Inhofe said. “From greenhouse gas regulations to water guidance to the tightening of the ozone standard, the Obama-EPA has delayed the implementation of rule after rule because they don’t want all those pink slips and price spikes to hit until after the election. But President Obama’s former climate czar Carol Browner was very clear about what’s in store for next year: she told several green groups not to worry because President Obama has a big green ‘to-do’ list for 2013—so they’ll get what they want. As a result, hard working Americans will lose their jobs and be subjected to skyrocketing energy prices

This report also importantly puts the spotlight back on an Obama-EPA that has, as the Washington Post said, earned a ‘reputation for abuse.’ It serves as a stark reminder that President Obama has presided over a green team administration that works every day to ‘crucify’ oil and gas companies and make sure that ‘if you want to build a coal plant you got a big problem.’ _Independent.org

Not just the EPA, but the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Land Management, and a number of other US federal agencies, have prepared regulations which will work to strangulate US energy industries:

... the proposed BLM rule would drive oil and gas developers off federal and tribal lands. Complying with the rules is too complicated and costly. Producers can realize a much faster and much better return on their capital investment by developing oil and gas reserves on adjoining private lands.

Federal and tribal lands hold large reserves of oil and natural gas. At a time when the United States desperately needs to move toward, not away from, energy independence, it makes no sense to let bureaucratic meddling effectively place these valuable domestic reserves out of reach. _Killing US Shale

Mr. Obama is certainly the president of the US, and probably will be for a number of years to come. He has the right to put his personal stamp on government policy.

In his first term, Mr. Obama largely kept his hands off the shale energy boom. That was fortunate for him, because without the shale boom, the US economy would have been in much worse condition. He "confined" his executive meddling on energy to a stonewalling of offshore oil, a slow regulatory death of coal, and what is essentially a freeze on nuclear.

But now, elections have consequences, and Mr. Obama has no reason to fear the full implementation of his agenda of energy starvation. The greatest uncertainty remaining is: How is it to be done, and when? These things must be done delicately __attributed to the Wicked Witch of the West.