Writing in today's Wall Street Journal, Tom Steyer and John Podesta attempt to explain why President Obama is the energy king-a notion the president will try to reinforce in the State of the Union address.
They write: "Under President Obama's leadership, we appear to be at the beginning of a domestic gas and oil boom. After a four-decade decline in oil production, the U.S. is now producing more than half of our oil domestically."
Yes, there has been an oil and gas boom, but that explosion has come on private land -not public, where the administration has done all it can to hinder exploration and drilling. New drilling technology known as "fracking"has opened up vast new oil and gas reserves and made them economically extractable. But far from encouraging this expansion, the administration and environmentalists have been fighting this drilling all across the country.
Steyer and Podesta also praise "U.S. public and private investments in clean energy," apparently without any sense of irony: "America is the largest clean-energy investor, after reclaiming this title from China last year."
No one has a problem with private companies investing in clean energy-and losing that investment if they make a bad bet. It's the administration's public-private crony capitalism that's the problem, where Obama chips in millions of taxpayer dollars to clean energy companies being funded by his wealthy friends. Solyndra is exhibit A, but there are many more.
The authors end by calling for renewing tax credits to help companies switch to making or using clean energy technology to "give clean-energy entrepreneurs the assurance they need to invest and expand their businesses."
That's the White House signal to its crony capitalists friends: Reelect Obama and more taxpayer "investments" are on the way.