by Gov. Bobby Jindal, Wall Street Journal, 3/12/12

"With rising energy costs making it more expensive to drive our cars, heat our homes, and fuel our sputtering economy, many Republicans are criticizing the Obama administration for a failure to adopt a comprehensive energy policy. I believe that critique lets the president off too easily. His administration does have a national energy policy—it's just a subservient by-product of his radical environmental policy.

This administration willfully ignores rational choices that would lower energy prices and reduce U.S. reliance on foreign energy sources…

To pursue national and economic security, the president's first obligations on energy should be to increase the quantity of domestic energy sources and to decrease the cost of that energy to consumers. That starts with implementing a clear strategy of increasing energy production in all sectors—including the hydrocarbon sources abhorred by the left—and by providing the kind of long-term regulatory certainty that private capital demands before investment…

Because energy prices are driven by a sense of future risk, the president should create a more predictable environment for exploration and production…

The reality is that the Obama administration slowed the permitting process long before the spill happened. Rather than playing catch up, we're falling further behind…

The president should also start opening new fields where there is clear bipartisan local support—along the mid-Atlantic coast, the Eastern Gulf, and in Alaska's National Wildlife Refuge—and he should stop slow-walking lease sales for onshore drilling on federal lands…

He could also send a clear signal that his administration will not shut down the revolutionary hydrofracking technique that is making our nation the world leader in natural gas. It's an industry that supported more than 600,000 jobs in 2010 and is expected to add more than a quarter million more jobs by 2015…

Third, the president could reverse a series of cabinet-level decisions that are at odds with a strategy of affordable domestic energy production…

These regulations—plus the mere threat of flawed proposals like cap and trade, which in 2008 the president said would 'bankrupt' anyone who wanted to open a coal plant—are sending a message that the United States is not a viable place for major, multiyear capital investments…

Finally, the president should announce today that he's going to reverse his decision on the Keystone XL pipeline. …Our friends to the north have been reliable and steadfast trading partners, and the president should be making this pipeline decision on policy grounds instead of cheap political appeals to his liberal base.

President Obama claims to be focusing this election year on the American economy. To make that pledge true, he must make wholesale changes to his energy policy and put energy prices and energy independence ahead of zealous adherence to left-wing environmental theory…"

Read more in the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203458604577265413033342028.html