Energy exports are vital U.S. interest

It’s encouraging that President Barack Obama at least paid lip service to the idea of making Europe less dependent on Russian gas during his visit to Brussels this week.

That showed awareness of what U.S. energy experts and pundits who have been saying in recent weeks about the increasingly obvious benefits of expanding American energy production and exports, particularly liquified natural gas. Europe now relies on Russia for as much as one-third of its natural gas, 27 percent of its crude oil and 24 percent of its coal. Talk about strategic free-market opportunities!

But Russian President Vladmir Putin shouldn’t expect to be competing with a flood of U.S. energy exports anytime soon, especially if he knows anything about the way our energy policy is tied in knots by environmental interests.

All Putin needs to do is look at the manner in which the Keystone XL Pipeline has been stalled for more than five years by environmental obstruction with the complicity of various Obama administration bureaucracies.

And guess what? The same strategy is being applied to the possibility of expanding liquified natural gas production and exports from the U.S.

Earlier this week, the Sierra Club and no less than 14 other environmental groups wrote to President Obama encouraging him to oppose the exports because fossil fuels contribute to global warming.

Never mind that their feckless disdain for fossil fuels will do nothing to curb demand for those fuels, unless they succeed in their goal of driving up the price of fossil fuels to a point where “green” energy sources are competitive in price.

Never mind that expanding domestic energy production, including the capacity to produce liquified gas, would become a tremendous economic driver, reducing the trade deficit, creating jobs and providing revenue benefits for government at all levels.

Never mind that energy exports hold the potential to be the most potent tool the war-weary U.S. may have in restraining Russia or other aggressor nations down the road.

All those things are non-priorities for groups like the Sierra Club, which has also aggressively been pursuing a “Beyond Coal” campaign for the last decade. The organization’s modus operandi in that effort is to seek ever-more burdensome and expensive regulatory control over coal-fired plants for the purpose of strangling the industry.

It all basically amounts to a costly regulatory tax on energy, and it is a nefariously regressive form of taxation at that — everybody needs energy, and the poorest can least afford higher energy costs.

With the exception of hydropower, fossil fuels continue to be the most affordable and efficient sources of energy, regardless of the unrelenting efforts of environmentalists to attempt to control the climate through punitive regulatory taxation schemes.

In one way it is odd that environmental elites have jumped into the business of obstructing the production and export of natural gas, which burns far cleaner than coal.

The U.S. has become one of the largest natural gas producers in the world, and it is galling that its potential could be restrained by a minority that clearly has the ear of the Obama administration.

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.