“The understanding of business is not there. The president has no business people around him. The fundamental understanding is not there.”
So said J.J. Mulva, CEO of Conoco-Phillips, to the Detroit News editorial board this week — another warm body in an extraordinary parade of American CEOs who are complaining that a major obstacle to their business today is Washington and our anti-business president.
While President Obama tours the country, selling his American Jobs Act as the solution to 9.1 percent unemployment, he is ignoring the advice of the job creators: Cut regulations and reform the tax code. As we’ve noted in recent weeks, our president is so divorced from business reality — so intrinsically hostile to business — that CEOs from Home Depot to Boeing to Michigan’s Wee Discover Child Daycare have felt compelled to speak out.
“I think we’re really hurting our economy,” said Mulva, of the myriad of anti-energy regulations that have hampered growth in his industry. “People are starting to talk about it. [Washington] has been trying to accomplish with regulation what they couldn’t accomplish with legislation.”
In the middle of a recession, Obama’s Green Church is costing Mulva’s industry thousands of jobs and millions of dollars, with restrictive regulation and ideologically-driven foot-dragging that has hampered development of a transcontinental pipeline bringing oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Anti-Gulf-production regulations have also cost “thousands of jobs in the region,” adds Mulva.
The White House’s anti-fossil fuel religion has spread to Conoco’s natural gas fracking operations, with green NGOs attacking a new energy industry that is an untold American success story.
“In the 1980s, we thought we were running out of natural gas,” says Mulva, who was in Michigan promoting its vast gas resources. “But thanks to new technologies, fracking has given us access to more than 100 years of reserves. This is no less than a modern industrial revolution.”
While the MSM channels green claims that yesterday’s wind technology is the future of energy, the new tech of fracking is quietly showing the potential to make cheap energy more abundant than ever.
Read more at Michigan View here.