Yesterday at Big Peace, Peter Schweizer, who collaborated with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal on the latter’s book Leadership and Crisis last year, put together an article on the Obama administration’s treatment of offshore oil exploration. Namely, the fact that while the administration says it’s allowing drilling in the Gulf it’s doing no such thing, and worse they’re making it more difficult to drill new wells as time goes by.

It’s a definite must-read. A few highlights…

We assume that politicians do what is in their own self-interest, but in this case Obama seems to be damaging himself because he is dragging down the economy.  As the Journal puts it, “The Gulf coast economy has been hit hard by the slowdown in drilling activity.”  And Obama doesn’t seem particularly eager to change that fact.

There are only a handful of possible explanations of why he is doing this.  (1) He doesn’t care,  and his radical environmental agenda comes first. (2) He hates oil companies so much that he’s willing to have his political fortunes damaged further by dragging down the economy. (3) He hates capitalism so much that he’s determined to “gut” a leading industry such as energy. (4)  There is raging incompetence in Washington.

Schweizer recounts the story from Jindal’s book about Obama offering BP checks and unemployment checks to Louisiana workers put out of jobs by his moratorium on offshore drilling, and he openly wonders whether the president is intentionally attempting to crash the nation’s economy.

Schweizer concludes, and we agree, that whether the president is affirmatively trying to destroy the oil and gas sector or not, clearly he’s knowingly doing so. Domestic oil production is down 13 percent from a year ago and falling fast; that means we’re more and more dependent on foreign sources of oil every day. And as we plow deeper and deeper into the international oil supply, we become more and more exposed to the kind of price run-up that pushed us into the economic recession which began 2007-08 amid $140 crude.

We will approach that number this summer. China and India have never had a higher demand for petroleum. The Chinese are playing a mercantilist game with their supplies, locking up resources and pulling them out of the domestic market when they do so. Meanwhile, Obama’s policies are driving America into competition with Europe and the Far East for international supplies and giving OPEC the power and incentive to squeeze us to death.

Which they will. They do it every time we allow them to.

If the President and the fools who advise him on energy policy believe that the coming price shocks will drive the country into the waiting arms of wind and solar energy, perhaps he should pay attention to what happened in Spain when another set of socialists decided to bet a nation’s economy on green energy. In Spain, billions in government subsidies for wind power have helped plunge that country into economic crisis, with 20 percent unemployment and a debt crisis threatening the country’s fiscal solvency. The Spanish are now going hat in hand to the Chinese for help so they don’t become the next Greece, having blown all their money on the same windmills the dopes in the White House think can substitute for oil from the Gulf of Mexico.

As for Schweizer’s postulation, it’s a good one. We can’t say whether Obama is stupid or evil, or both. Functionally, it doesn’t matter – the president is destroying Louisiana’s economy and the rest of the country is likely to follow.