Pain at the Pump

The sudden, significant spike in gas prices is straining American family budgets and jeopardizing our fragile economic recovery. Unrest in North Africa and the Middle East has driven prices up 20 cents in just the last few days, and prices have increased 68 cents compared to this time last year. According to analysts, every penny increase in gas prices costs consumers an extra $4 million per day.

American energy prices will continue to be held hostage to the increasingly volatile twists and turns of Middle Eastern political developments until we break our dependence on foreign oil by developing domestic fuel resources.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration has made this vastly more difficult by erecting one roadblock after another to American energy exploration and production.

It can never be said that President Obama is anything less than thorough in his opposition to domestic energy. Through oppressive regulations or outright bans, his administration has thwarted exploration in deep water, shallow water, the Gulf of Mexico, Pacific Coast, Atlantic Coast, the barren slopes of Alaska and states of the Rocky Mountain west.

The consequences of all this lost potential can be measured not just in price per gallon at the gas pump but in lost jobs and economic productivity. According to the administration's own estimates, the de facto drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico, still in place almost one year after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, has cost 12,000 jobs and sent rigs packing to find oil in other countries. Although Congress lifted a ban on outer continental shelf exploration in 2008, the Obama administration has placed all the coasts off limits to drilling, preventing $8 trillion in economic output and the creation of 1.2 million annual jobs, according to the American Energy Alliance.

Thanks to regulations imposed on onshore production, oil and gas leasing in western states has fallen 67 percent since 2005. Decreased access to the region's oil shale resources alone deprives us of as much as 1.5 trillion barrels of oil, according to US Geological Survey estimates. That's six times the amount of Saudi Arabia's verified resources and enough energy to supply U.S. needs for the next 200 years. New regulatory hurdles also prevent development of our natural gas resources. The United States has the world's sixth largest reserves of natural gas, yet less than 1 percent of those resources are used for vehicle fuel.

Not content merely to block energy production from sea to shining sea and all points in between, the administration is determined to tax any production that remains. President Obama's budget for 2012 includes over $60 billion in tax and fee increases on energy production. Obama's EPA also intends to enact the notorious cap and trade taxes through regulations even though the policy failed to make it through Congress. Even President Obama conceded that this national energy tax would cause electricity rates to "necessarily skyrocket." I am proud to join Oklahoma's entire congressional delegation in supporting Sen. Inhofe's bill to prevent this fiscally disastrous subversion of the legislative process.

Sen. Inhofe's Energy Tax Prevention Act is just one of many policies congressional Republicans are advancing to promote American energy production. Speaker Boehner and other House majority leaders recently launched the American Energy Initiative. The goal of the plan is quite simple: Get government out of the way of domestic energy production. By eliminating the barriers the Obama administration has raised, we can create jobs, lower gas prices and reduce the dependence on foreign oil that compromises both our safety and economic security.

There is little we can do to prevent turmoil in other countries from increasing our gas prices at home. But there is much we can do to minimize the effects of these fluctuations by producing our own energy, and that is exactly what the American Energy Initiative is designed to do.