Obama's Head-Fake on U.S. Energy Development

By Gary Jason

The "insanity" of Obama's Keystone XL pipeline decision is only the latest of the administration's actions to block American fossil fuel production  to attract notice.  The EPA, the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture, and the SEC have attacked the companies utilizing fracking technology to recover oil and gas; the EPA is moving quickly to shut down as many coal plants as it can; and the Department of the Interior has worked frantically to block more deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico while also systematically locking away huge tracts of land even from exploration.

But wait!  Out of the blue, the Obama administration seems to be embracing -- fracked gas!  Yes, a recent WSJ piece points out that the latest White House jobs report -- no doubt a slender volume, indeed! -- brags that despite past "fears of a looming natural gas shortage" (spread in great part by environmentalists, of course), "the discovery of new natural gas reserves, such as the Marcellus Shale, and the development of hydraulic fracturing techniques to extract natural gas from these reserves has led to rapidly growing domestic production and relatively low domestic prices for households and downstream industrial users."

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/obamas_head-fake_on_us_energy_development.html#ixzz1kBdH6qGi