The Obama administration is readying a series of major new rules for the energy industry that Stephen Moore, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, brands a "mindless" strategy that will play into the hands of OPEC and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The oil and gas industry enjoyed a boom that carried the rest of the U.S. economy for the past six years, but it is now struggling, with new drilling permits sinking and some wells shutting down, according to Moore.
The new federal energy regulations would curb methane emissions from natural gas and oil, slap new restrictions on fracking, impose additional limits on Arctic drilling and add more restrictions on rail tanker cars.
"The biggest beneficiaries from this lunacy will be many of America's mortal enemies. By driving up the cost of domestic energy production, OPEC, the Saudi oil sheiks, the IS terrorist networks funded with petrodollars and Vladimir Putin come away big winners," said
Moore wrote in a column for Investor's Business Daily.
"The losers will be the hundreds of thousands of Americans employed by the oil and gas industry, anyone who drives a car, U.S. manufacturers who benefit from low energy costs and families who use natural gas to heat their homes or for electricity."
In Moore's view, it's no accident that the White House is pushing new energy restrictions just as the oil and gas industry is on the ropes.
"This is an administration that hates fossil fuels, so the endgame here is a slow death to the oil, gas and coal industries by regulatory strangulation. This will force-feed the nation to consume much more expensive 'green' energy."
Moore said most of the net new jobs in the U.S. economy in the past six years have come from oil and gas companies, and that U.S. reliance on foreign oil has been more than sliced in half during that time.
"If the federal government simply stays out of the way, the U.S. by 2020 can be an energy-exporting nation, no longer reliant on dangerous, expensive and unstable foreign sources," he argued.
"The new White House rules are yet another reminder that the benefits of the U.S. energy boom are in spite of, not because of, Obama policies."
According to
The Wall Street Journal, the White House effort to load more regulatory burdens onto the energy industry is motivated by a desire for "burnishing President Barack Obama 's environmental legacy in his final two years."
The way the new rules are being approached does not sit well with Jack Gerard, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, who suggested Obama is bypassing Congress in order to get his way unilaterally.
"There's this attitude that if the people and the democratically elected institutions don't agree, we're going to go it alone," Gerard told the Journal. "I think that attitude is permeating some of the regulatory bodies."
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