This piece by New Orleans-based author and journalist Humberto Fontova in the American Thinker is a must-read for any conservative looking for ammunition against the envirosocialist mob seeking to destroy Louisiana’s oil and gas sector.

Fontova exposes the facts about offshore oil drilling and why it is not only not a threat to the environment but an asset to it, while at the same time saving America billions of dollars, producing thousands upon thousands of well-paying jobs and creating untold wealth to fuel the retirement of millions of our countrymen.

Among the facts (stubborn things, facts, and often inconvenient to those who would usurp our freedoms) Fontova assaults the Left with are:

– Littered with offshore oil rigs, Louisiana’s fisheries supply some 30 percent of America’s seafood. Only Alaska, with 10 times the coastline, supplies slightly more.

– 3,200 of the roughly 3,700 offshore production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico are in Louisiana waters. Eighty percent of the oil and 72 percent of the natural gas produced in the Continental U.S. comes from the Gulf’s offshore platforms. Not a single major oil spill has come from a half-century of offshore oil drilling in the Gulf.

– Virtually all of the major oil spills in American history have come from the transportation of oil, not the extraction of it. The worst of those spills, from the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound in Alaska, was completely cleaned up in a very short time and is in pristine shape now. More oil seeps into the oceans naturally on a daily basis than has ever been spilled by man’s activities.

– The Outer Continental Shelf holds an estimated 115 billion barrels of oil and 633 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

– A study by LSU’s Sea Grant college shows that 85 percent of Louisiana fishing trips involve fishing around Gulf oil platforms. The same study shows 50 times more marine life around an oil production platform than in the surrounding Gulf bottoms.

So the next time you get into a conversation with someone who attempts to preach to you of the evils of offshore oil drilling, you are now armed with facts. The fact is that oil extraction in American waters by American oil companies is infinitely more environmentally safe and in fact beneficial than extraction in other countries where state-run oil companies are less professional and less efficient, and America’s economy depends on the production of domestic fossil fuels. Attempts to limit or destroy that production cause real pain to real people without reducing pain to our environment whatsoever.

In fact, you have permission from The Hayride to accuse those left-wing envirosocialists of cruelty to their fellow man. You can even say that their policies are evil for inflicting pain on working Americans.

Go on, do it. We’ve got your back.