President Obama's tour of oil and gas country is a stunning reversal; remember two years ago he was in California lauding Solyndra saying, "It's here that companies like Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future." We saw how well that worked: Solyndra is bankrupt, around 1,000 workers have been laid off, and $535 million in taxpayer dollars has been thrown out the window - a stark contrast from the site of this new oil pipeline where there are so many good paying jobs and not enough people to take them.
"The place is booming," said Ali Velshi in a recent CNN piece on development in Oklahoma, "There's a shortage of workers around here. I mean we know nationally there's actually a shortage of engineers and oil workers in skilled and unskilled labor. In fact, petroleum engineers - get this, Carol - petroleum engineers graduating from school can earn upwards of $90,000 a year."
Link to Video: CNN Spotlight on Cushing, Oklahoma
What's Oklahoma's secret? It's simple: Oklahoma actually develops its own resources. Oklahoma has over 83,000 producing oil wells and 43,000 producing natural gas wells. Oklahoma City University found in 2009 that the Oklahoma oil and gas industry supports 300,000 jobs and contributes $51 billion to the state economy every year. That is precisely why Oklahoma's unemployment rate is consistently much lower than the national employment rate, which has been hovering around 8 to 9 percent.
Unfortunately, we know President Obama's Oklahoma trip is little more than a campaign stop in an attempt to salvage his dismal energy record, as skyrocketing gas prices - which his policies are expressly designed to create - threaten his job. We know that President Obama still thinks that oil and gas are the fuels of the past, as does the "green team" he surrounds himself with. His Energy Secretary Steven Chu famously said, "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe" and his chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers Alan Krueger said, "The Administration believes that it is no longer sufficient to address our nation's energy needs by finding more fossil fuels." As Oklahoma clearly demonstrates, they are wrong: oil and gas are very much the fuels of the present and the foreseeable future.
So America has two choices: we can choose the path of President Obama's bankrupt Solyndra fantasy, or we can develop our nation's vast resources. The former is President Obama's war on affordable energy, which leads to a lagging economy, fewer jobs, and higher gas and electricity prices. The latter is a path that leads to an economic boom, where good-paying jobs are in abundance. This is the true path to prosperity. Mr. President, these Oklahoma "flat-earthers" may be on to something.
