Senator Jim Talent on Energy Policy

Many Americans believe that the United States is deficient in energy resources. It is certainly true that energy costs America more than it should, and that our access to energy is less secure than it ought to be. But contrary to popular belief, our fundamental problem is not a shortage of domestic supply.

America has hundreds of years of coal reserves. Recent discoveries are making the United States the “Saudi Arabia of natural gas.” Producing nuclear energy is less a question of natural resources than of technological understanding, and in that America is still the leader of the world.

Even oil, our scarcest commodity, is available in much greater quantity than many people realize. America has domestic reserves of at least twenty billion barrels of oil that could be recovered. That is not counting the oil that may be available, but which we do not know about because the federal government will not allow us to look for it.

Yes, our government will not even conduct a thorough survey—or allow others to explore—to find out how much oil America has. It is an example that illustrates the reason why energy is too expensive and insecure in the United States. The problem is not that America does not have energy. The problem is that our government—alone among the governments of the world—will not allow its own people to recover the energy that they possess.

Mitt Romney has thoroughly reviewed all the ways that our government stops us from getting energy: moratoriums, “permitoriums,” bureaucratic hostility, uncertainty about old regulations, uncertainty about new regulations—much of it with the intention, and all of it with the effect, of making the recovery of energy so expensive and so uncertain that people look for energy in other countries and not here.

As President Obama once remarked, commenting proudly about the costly new regulations he sought to impose on coal plants: “[I]f somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them … .”

What government wants its domestic companies to go bankrupt if they produce energy their own people need from resources their own people possess? Only our dysfunctional government.

In fact, our government even subsidizes the production of energy elsewhere while stopping it here. President Obama traveled to Brazil to give them $2 billion to produce oil in that country, at the same time that his orders prevented exploration for oil within the boundaries of the United States.

Like so many other policies set by Washington, this defies common sense. In fact, in today’s economic and geopolitical climate—with so many Americans needing jobs and so many countries using energy as a weapon against us—a policy of deliberately not utilizing the energy resources we have is madness.

Stopping energy production in the United States has cost us millions of jobs in the energy industry alone—good, high paying jobs that Americans need. It has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue because energy companies pay royalties and fees when they lease land from the government to produce energy. It has allowed hostile foreign regimes and movements to hold us hostage or extract money from us that is then used against us.

Worst of all, stopping energy production has hurt the economy, and that is bad for everyone. America cannot produce jobs without economic growth. America cannot pay its debts without economic growth. America cannot defend its freedom, protect its environment, educate its children, or produce new alternative forms of energy without economic growth.

But the converse is also true. With economic growth, we can do all those things, and we can do them better than we have ever done them before.

That is why Mitt Romney is so enthusiastic about his energy proposals. They really do represent a win for everyone. America simply needs to approach energy production the way other countries do. Our government should have strong, certain, and workable rules that allow oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy to be produced in a timely fashion. We need to fund basic research on alternative energies, stop intervening on behalf of or against particular companies or products, and phase out subsidies of technologies that have made little or no progress toward competing successfully in the market.

Mitt Romney believes that the energy sector can lead an economic resurgence for the whole country. Energy can be a huge advantage for America rather than a constant source of concern and cost. That will happen if we have faith in the dynamic possibilities of our country and its free market system. With the right leadership, it can happen faster than we now predict and have a greater impact for good than we now think possible.

Jim Talent is a former U.S. Senator from Missouri.