Among the greatest challenges facing our country is the lack of a comprehensive domestic energy policy that capitalizes on all our energy resources, bolsters our economy and creates a strong, secure and sustainable future. While policymakers on both sides of the aisle agree on the importance of an ‘all of the above’ approach to energy policy, we believe there are three components that must be included: robust domestic energy development, especially from shale, energy efficiency and energy recovery.

It is now well-known that natural gas from shale is possibly the most important energy development in 50 years. Natural gas is especially important to the chemical industry because we use it not only for heat and power but also as our feedstock, transforming it into the basic building blocks for 96 percent of goods that Americans use every day.

This competitive advantage enables chemistry to leverage these new supplies of natural gas to ignite a renaissance in American manufacturing, making the U.S. more competitive and creating tens of thousands of high-paying jobs.

Our ability to capitalize on these new supplies will rely on sound regulatory policies that allow for robust production while protecting the environment and surrounding communities. We believe states are best equipped to make the decisions about how to responsibly oversee energy production in their communities.

Meanwhile, energy efficiency is the easiest, most cost-effective way to stretch our energy supplies, enhance energy security and reduce energy costs. The business of chemistry is responsible for many of the innovations that make energy efficiency possible in factories, cars, homes, and commercial buildings.

One way to increase energy efficiency at the state level is the updating of state residential and commercial building codes that encourage more energy efficient construction. By adopting, implementing and enforcing the 2012 model energy conservation code, and passing laws that automatically adopt updated codes, states can dramatically reduce energy use and realize the economic and environmental benefits.

We were also encouraged to see President Obama’s recent executive order calling for greater industrial energy efficiency and a national goal to deploy 40 GW of new combined heat and power (CHP) capacity by 2020.

There is another promising energy resource which is sustainable, abundant and homegrown: municipal solid waste. In cases where recycling is not an economic option, converting solid waste, particularly non-recycled plastics, to energy is a sustainable alternative and a promising form of energy recovery.

There are 85 waste-to-energy facilities in 25 states that are currently producing enough energy to power 2 million homes. If all the municipal solid waste produced in the United States were diverted from landfills to waste-to-energy facilities, it could produce enough energy to power more than 16 million households every year.

Policymakers should level the playing field for energy recovery and ensure definitions of renewable energy are broadened to include non-recycled and other recurring wastes. Regulations and permitting processes should not discourage the establishment of new energy recovery capacity.

Regardless of what happens in Congress this year, there are plenty of ways that state and local governments can work together to address the country’s energy needs to ensure a comprehensive domestic energy strategy that results in affordable and abundant energy production, a revival in American manufacturing, and thousands of new jobs in communities across the country.

There are a lot of good reasons to support a national comprehensive energy policy, despte the gridlock in Congress today. For some, the reasons are energy independence and security – decreasing our reliance on foreign, and sometimes unpredictable, energy sources. Others see the potential for job growth in developing domestic sources of energy. Regardless of the reason the conclusions are largely the same: an “all of the above” policy that continues to invest in renewables is the best approach.

The best way to tackle the nation’s energy challenges – whatever the motivation – is a mix of public and private partnerships. These partnerships, in the form of direct federal support, investment incentives, tax treatments, and so forth, have long been relied on by a range of energy sources, including hydropower, natural gas, and oil. More recently the federal government has encouraged investors and entrepreneurs to develop newer sources of power, including solar. According to a study by the Howard Baker Center at the University of Tennessee released earlier this year, federal support for solar is on track to pay off faster, and with greater impact, and greater job creation, than federal support of other energy sources.

The solar industry is growing and providing more power, more affordably, to more communities, corporations, and government agencies than ever before. Solar helps power everything from Apple to Walmart, and the U.S. Air Force to my own home. We need to ensure the policies that have led to this growth and success remain in place so solar can continue to play a vital role in our nation’s energy policy.

We continue to face what a growing consensus of national security leaders label a strategic threat to the United States- our single-source dependence on oil to power our cars and trucks. A former U.S. Army Captain I was talking to put it best. In describing how he was trained to plan operations he said, “The military trains you to think about every possible contingency, to be ready in case anything goes wrong. But we’ve got no contingency plan if we don’t have fuel.”

In fact, the Department of Defense, as the largest institutional consumer of oil in the world, is acutely vulnerable to spikes in the price of oil. Every time the price of oil rises by $10 a barrel, the DoD is left with a $1.3 billion bill. Since DoD purchases fuel from its Operations and Maintenance budgets, these unexpected budget shortfalls are paid for by reprogramming funds from training and maintenance. In conversations with retired military leaders, I’ve heard story after story of fighter pilots having their flight hours cut to minimum readiness standards and ships left in port for training exercises, all because the respective unit’s fuel budgets were disrupted by price increases.

The military’s vulnerability to spikes in the price of oil is endemic of the U.S. economy generally. Even with U.S. oil demand leveling off over the past five years, the country still accounts for 22 percent of global demand, and oil still powers more than 95 percent of our transportation sector. Shackled to a single source of fuel, we must expend significant resources to unsure supply lines in unstable geopolitical regions like the Persian Gulf remain open. According to a RAND Corporation study, the U.S. military spends as much as $84 billion annually in operational costs to keep open the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic chokepoint for oil supplies in the Persian Gulf.

Contrary to what you hear from fossil fuel advocates, this isn’t a problem we can drill our way out of. Oil is traded on a global market, meaning that there’s no way to guarantee the oil we drill here will stay here. And with prices set by global demand and global supply, any increases in our production capacity will be more than offset in world where China’s demand for oil is projected to increase by 80 percent and India’s demand is projected to increase by 96 percent in the next two decades.

Fortunately, the U.S. military is taking aggressive steps to reduce its dependence on petroleum fuels. In doing so, the military is setting an example for us to follow and providing the spark for the innovations needed to secure America with clean energy. The Navy is developing advanced biofuels that can be dropped into its ships and aircraft, and because these fuels are derived from products like algae or recycled cooking oil, they don’t affect crop prices. The Army is developing a hybrid-electric drivetrain Humvee that delivers the same performance, power, and protection but with 90 percent better fuel efficiency. The Marine Corps has reduced the number of dangerous fuel convoys needed to supply forward operating bases in Afghanistan by using solar blankets and solar tents to recharge batteries.

The military’s success in developing clean, renewable energy technologies provides a blueprint for a more secure and prosperous future for all Americans. We can and must follow the military’s example by investing in the energy solutions of tomorrow instead of remaining entrenched in the partisan politics that dominate our energy debate today.

The United States needs secure energy supplies at affordable prices. As a country, we are energy resource rich. But developing any of the options for domestic energy requires significant private capital investment. And much of the needed investment capital is frozen due to the recent economic downturn.

A 2009 Sandia National Labs study estimated that producing energy equivalent amounts of advanced biofuels and domestic petroleum resources by 2030 would require equal amounts of capital expenditures, roughly in the neighborhood of $250 billion. This should put the competing demands for energy policy in perspective – every industry wants some measure of assurance that if the investment is made and the capacity is built, a market for the product will exist.

Investment tends to flow to incumbent technologies, and petroleum refining enjoys an incumbent position in the American economy with a wide network for refining, storage and distribution – all built over the past century with generous federal tax and regulatory support. But our ongoing reliance on foreign oil is a Catch 22 for economic growth and investment. Investment in domestic oil refining relies on high prices set by OPEC to ensure a return. At the same time, the high cost of foreign oil hampers our ability to restart the economic growth needed to make that investment and to compete with other countries, since we must compete with other countries to obtain the same sources of foreign oil.

In 2007, the U.S. Congress established a plan to break the Catch 22 of reliance on foreign oil. The Renewable Fuel Standard changed the status quo by ensuring that the market would be open to domestically produced biofuels, particularly advanced biofuels made with technology developed here in the U.S. In response, companies across the country made significant investments in developing the technology. Large capital investments – hundreds of millions of dollars – are beginning to flow to the construction of new biorefineries – even with the economic environment still presenting challenges – because of this policy’s assurance that market incumbents cannot block access for new products.

Of course, the petroleum refining industry is doing everything it can to destabilize that policy and shake the confidence of investors in the sector. But destabilizing the RFS will not revive the petroleum refining industry’s prospects for a return on investment and a contribution to U.S. economic growth. The oil refining industry has been shuttering capacity recently, due to a failure to update old refineries and is laying of workers even as biofuel companies are building new modern biorefineries and creating jobs and home grown fuels. .

Without question, the U.S. needs to do everything it can to promote domestic energy, especially oil and gas, to help meet our future population demands. And don't forget that enhanced energy production means an enhanced job market. Energy-producing states including Texas, Oklahoma, Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota and Nebraska are seeing impressive income and job growth gains mostly attributed to the growing demands for their robust commodities, including oil and gas. Allowing the Keystone Pipeline would also enhance our energy supply and create more jobs. We should also allow companies export our robust supplies of natural gas.

The private sector is already making strides in new business models that accommodate changes in climate and weather patterns through "no regrets" solutions (or changes that would be undertaken in the normal course of business). Examples of this might include companies that are developing more drought-resistant seeds or hardening coastal infrastructure at risk from sea level rise.

To promote more energy production and more "no regrets" business solutions, we need a tax code that retains robust capital cost recovery. Tax provisions including accelerated and bonus depreciation, Last In First Out (LIFO) and Section 199, and provisions utilized by the oil and gas industry which are all on the table as potential eliminations as a trade-off for reductions in lowering corporate tax rates should be preserved.

Finally, we need reductions in regulatory and permitting barriers that are often factors hindering U.S. companies from making investments to improve or expand their facilities. For example, in addition to permits to meet federal regulations there are often additional state and local permit requirements, which add time and cost to a project getting underway. Environmental regulations should meet a cost/benefit test--those that have minimal environmental impact but place a chokehold on businesses should be eliminated.

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What are the greatest energy challenges facing the country right now? Where do climate change and energy security fit into this debate? What can the private sector, state and local governments, and other countries do to get closer to tackling some of the biggest hurdles while Washington is gridlocked?

These aren’t easy questions to answers, but the biggest challenge facing the nation is a failure to address energy realities.

Since 1973, energy policy has been driven by wishful thinking, not facts and objective truths. The extreme polarization that we have observed in recent years only makes our energy problems worse. The only way to fix the extreme state of gridlock that hampers progress on all major issues is for voters to demand pragmatic solutions instead of posturing. As Henry Clay once observed, politics is about governing, and you can’t govern if you can’t compromise. Today, compromise is viewed as some sort of fatal disease and finding common ground is where the other guy capitulates.

When politicians use energy policy to play favorites or push technology by forcing mandates, they are preventing the economy from achieving its full growth potential. Economic growth is a function of labor, capital, energy, productivity, ingenuity, and an investment friendly climate. Each element is essential to success.

It should be obvious that economic activities across industries depend on power and mobility to produce and distribute the goods and services produced. It should also be obvious that the cost of those factors of production affect how the others are used, and therefore that effective policy should yield the most abundant and affordable energy achievable.

A background paper by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment stated, “Energy is a fundamental input in our economy, essential for running our country’s factories, shipping the Nation’s output, and ringing up the sales.” The Encyclopedia of Energy contains a survey article by David Stern of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute which states “energy use and the level of economic activity are found to be tightly coupled.”

We need an energy policy that recognizes energy is a fundamental economic input. Such a policy should also be based on an understanding of the unintended consequences of interfering with market forces or attempting to mandate a technological advance on a politically determined schedule. That has happened time and time again over the past 39 years. The most recent and perhaps most flagrant example is the mandate schedule for cellulosic ethanol – a product that doesn’t exist for commercial use – and then the imposition of fines for not meeting that requirement.

Overcoming the strong opposition to continued reliance on fossil energy is an economic imperative. The shale gas revolution offers significant investment opportunities for industries that rely on natural gas – chemical companies, for example. Investments that have been moving abroad will return to the US if zealotry does not become a mountain too high to climb. Energy investments tied to increased production of low priced gas brings with it good paying jobs.

There are comparable opportunities for further increases in North American oil production which also produces job creation and domestic investment. Unrealistic and unreasonable impediments to oil production off of the East Coast, Alaska, and the Easter Gulf simply mean that foreign imports will remain higher than necessary.

Transportation, which will rely on petroleum based fuels for decades to come, is essential for both commerce and personal mobility. To the extent those fuels are domestically produced, the risk associated with them is reduced, a clear economic benefit. It is ironic that the President argues against import dependency but has been a laggard in offering public lands for exploration and production. It is also ironic that in his push for uneconomic electric vehicles he is willing to trade one type of dependency – oil imports – for another. Electric vehicles use lithium batteries which require rare earth minerals for which China has a virtual global monopoly.

Beyond the opportunities for greater domestic development of our own fossil energy resources, there is the challenge to establish and fund a long term R&D program that is allowed to run its course without political meddling and which provides opportunities for public-private collaboration.

The best policy ideas and proposals will be for naught if the Administration and Congress remain unwilling to “work the problem” and find common ground. Bipartisanship from the center would have a greater value today than any time in recent memory.

This post was co-authored by Max Luke, an associate with the Breakthrough Institute's Energy and Climate Program.

Among the many energy-related challenges the United States faces today, the imperative to regain a global leadership role in energy innovation stands out. America, the birth place energy systems and technologies widely replicated around the word, risks falling behind in the race to develop and deploy the advanced technologies that will satisfy surging energy demand and power a shift towards a cleaner, cheaper, more secure global energy system.

In the next 25 years global energy demand will grow by 50 percent from 520 quadrillion to 770 quadrillion British thermal units (BTU); much of this growth will be supplied by advanced energy technologies in developing countries. In the last few decades the world’s most populous and fastest growing nations – China, India, Russia, South Korea, Brazil – have heavily invested in advanced energy innovation to supply their own energy needs, benefitting from exports to an expanding global market. The nations that are able to tap into the multimillion dollar-and-growing export market for advanced energy technologies will reap monumental economic benefits.

Unfortunately, the United States has fallen behind as the global innovation leader, eclipsed by countries that have put significant resources toward strengthening their innovative capacities. To regain global energy innovation leadership in an increasingly competitive advanced energy economy, the United States must leverage public-private institutions and smart development and deployment investments to rapidly drive clean tech down the cost curve and foster a market for new energy technologies.

We have much to learn from our own history. From the Tennessee Valley Authority and other similar programs, America led early efforts towards mass electrification. From the Manhattan Project to “Atoms for Peace,” public investments in nuclear energy led to the development and commercialization of nuclear power. Federal labs developed early iterations of today’s increasingly abundant wind turbines and solar panels. Decades of government support for R&D, demonstration, and deployment of hydraulic fracturing technologies paved the way for industry to tap into abundant, and previously unattainable, shale gas. More recently, federal investments in battery manufacturing and electric vehicles will empower US businesses to capture 40 percent of the global market for batteries, up from 2 percent in 2008.

However, these massively successful public-private innovation models have been imported by international competitors, and the United States now finds itself falling behind a race it has led for over a century. As Robert Atkinson and Stephen Ezell detail in their new book Innovation Economics, the United States has lost its position as the global innovation frontrunner. The authors note that in the mid-1960s, the federal government alone invested more in scientific R&D than all other countries combined. Today, we’re ranked 22^nd in terms of government-funded research. The R&D tax credit, pioneered in the US, was at one time the most generous in the world—now it ranks 27^th.

The story is much the same in the advanced energy sector, where Asia’s “clean energy tigers” – China, Japan, South Korea, and others – now challenge or have already surpassed the U.S. in the production of virtually all clean energy technologies. Largely by way of questionable trade policies, China has gained the lead in global markets for clean tech products. Germany and Denmark continue to challenge America in solar and wind manufacturing. While American utilities have begun construction on Generation III+ nuclear reactors in Georgia, other nations including Russia and India are hard at work developing Generation IV advanced breeder reactors. The Australian government, meanwhile, recently announced the opening of an R&D-focused renewable energy agency (ARENA), which boasts a larger budget and longer-term funding than the US equivalent agency, ARPA-E.

The United States must confront these international competitors by investing in stronger, more robust innovation institutions and reigniting a network of public-private partnerships. In addition to smart deployment investments and funding for basic energy sciences and R&D, The Breakthrough Institute has recommended the creation a set of smart public-private institutions to accelerate the path to commercialization of nascent energy technologies. These include a 2009 proposal for a National Institutes of Energy, similar to the National Institutes of Health; a Clean Energy Deployment Administration that would offer a flexible suite of investment vehicles for promising and innovative advanced clean energy ventures; and a National Clean Energy Testbeds program to provide entrepreneurs and advanced energy technology ventures the facilities and resources to demonstrate commercial viability by opening up public lands to testing. America must also strengthen its support for advanced energy research and development by bolstering support for federal agencies like ARPA-E and regional energy innovation clusters.

The history of energy innovation successes makes it clear that only with mission-oriented and sustained public-private investments and institutions can new technologies and new markets reach commercial maturity. This model, tested against the results of the most innovative country in the most innovative century of all time, eschews both the simple “innovation pipeline” approach that assumes simply increasing funding for R&D will produce the necessary breakthroughs, and the laissez-faire adherents who would take the country back to the imaginary halcyon days when the private sector alone led technological innovation efforts.

Our biggest near-term energy challenge? Diversification. In the face of catastrophic climate change, how can we transition away from dirty generation and imported fossil fuels and develop a base load of clean, domestic energy?

Offshore wind could provide a definitive solution. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that more than 4,000 gigawatts of electricity — more than four times what the U.S. power system can currently produce — could be generated from winds blowing above coastal waters. Subsequently, the DOE’s National Offshore Wind Strategy includes 10 GW of commercially competitive offshore wind by 2020, and 54 GW by 2030. The opportunities on the Atlantic Coast of the U.S. alone are immense for this new technology, which has already taken hold in Europe in a big way.

So why aren’t we moving on this opportunity? One of the simplest arguments against developing our country’s offshore wind resource is that it’s expensive. However, a new analysis by the Offshore Wind Accelerator Project shows that “aggregated procurement,” or purchases of large amounts of offshore wind energy by buyers networks with good credit ratings, could substantially lower its costs. In fact, the report found that, in combination with low-cost financing and extension of the federal Investment Tax Credit, aggregated procurement could lower the near-term expected levelized cost of energy for offshore wind to $95 per megawatt hour, on average. This would make offshore wind power highly competitive with other forms of electricity in the U.S.

So, how does it work? By creating economies of scale. Buyers’ networks, essentially consortiums of creditworthy purchasers (including utilities, state and federal agencies, and large private commercial and/or institutional entities), enter into long-term contracts with a developer(s) for a project’s generation. By wielding more combined purchasing power than the members could individually, a buyers’ network can spread fixed costs for things like transmission lines; can lower construction costs by streamlining processes; can reduce concentration of risk; and can reduce capital costs. The result, according to the report, is cost-competitive offshore wind power.

In the face of huge energy challenges, innovative solutions like aggregated procurement could be game changers. Despite the enormous job creation potential of offshore wind, and the hard-won, incremental successes of developers like Cape Wind and Fishermen’s Energy, opponents of offshore wind often turn to simplistic arguments about high costs. Buyers’ networks could bring costs down while providing developers – and investors – with confidence to move forward with utility-scale projects.

The biggest challenge to energy policy in the United States is constant government interference and market distortion. After several years of the government trying to pick winners and losers ending in obvious failures like Solyndra, billions in wasted taxpayer dollars, and green job-creation schemes that actually kill more jobs than they create, it’s time to recognize that the government should be involved in broad policy making, and get out of the way of the market.

This is not a theoretical viewpoint; the evidence in support of market forces versus government command-and-control over more than a century is overwhelming. Despite the mountain of evidence, there are those who continue to argue that energy is somehow different, and cannot be left to the market. However, the notion that government can make better decisions than thousands of companies and millions of consumers making countless decisions while operating within a market framework has been proven time and again to be false.

Rather than picking winners and losers, decreeing which are the favored energy sources, and regulating others out of business, governments should get out of the way and allow markets to be the arbiter of our energy mix based on efficiency, cost, and value. The government’s role should be to provide access to domestic resources, and ensure regulation does not stifle American production. The same market forces that determine the best energy for the lowest cost can also address societal challenges like energy security and climate change.

Oil and natural gas production provides recent examples. Energy security has increased dramatically over the last seven years, as imports of foreign oil have dropped from 60% to 42%. The keys to increased domestic production have been private-sector investment and technical innovation which have unlocked the Bakken, Niobrara, Eagle Ford, and other unconventional oil formations on mainly private lands. Coupled with Canadian production, increased American production is compelling many credible energy analysts to predict that North American could be largely energy independent by 2020.

Free-market natural gas development has also provided a meaningful solution for climate change. Again, private-sector investment and technical innovation have unlocked abundant domestic natural gas supplies while enabling increased natural gas electricity generation. Enhanced natural gas electricity generation has caused U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to plummet to 1992 levels. Although we never signed onto the command-and-control Kyoto treaty, the United States is the only developed nation that has significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions and is close to meeting Kyoto’s 1990 targets. And we did it through market forces.

It’s time for the government to stop interfering with the market, increase access to energy resources on federal lands, and ensure a regulatory framework that doesn’t discourage domestic energy development.

In the United States, the federal government has a limited set of tools to drive energy policy - federal leasing rules, interstate commerce via FERC, environmental regulation, and then tax and procurement policies. In reality, there has been little change at the national level in energy policies between the Democratic and Republican presidencies, aside from all the chest pounding to the contrary. State and Local governments have far more clout and involvement in energy policies - including siting and permitting rules, setting electric rates, tax incentives and waivers, codes and standards, environmental protection including greenhouse gas emissions reductions. "Mayors have single-handedly taken action on climate protection efforts and in many cases, creatively launched local energy efficiency programs to help reduce our carbon footprint in American cities." declared Tom Cochran, CEO & Executive Director, U.S. Conference of Mayors. Mayors are on the front lines of impacting human behavior - from their work on recycling, to the 1054 mayors who joined The U.S. Conference of Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement, vowing to reduce carbon emissions in their cities below 1990 levels, in line with the Kyoto Protocol. For instance, a climate guidebook will become part of ICLEI’s (International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives) Climate Resilient Communities program, which is administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). ICLEI’s Climate Resilient Communities program is also helping Miami-Dade County to concoct its own strategies for climate change adaptation , and in Arlington County, Va. the Fresh AIRE (Arlington Initiative to Reduce Emissions) Campaign includes a goal that the Arlington County government will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent from 2000 to 2012. Sarasota County, Fla. recently became the nation’s first county to adopt the American Institute of Architects’ 2030 Challenge. The challenge calls for the reduction of fossil fuel use in renovated and new buildings by 60 percent in 2010, 70 percent in 2015, 80 percent in 2020 and 90 percent in 2025. The ultimate goal is to design county buildings to be carbon-neutral by the year 2030. All of these activities driven by local governments, are totally outside of the federal agenda. California is ready to implement a “cap and trade,” a system that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions generated in the state by capping the amount of the emissions businesses may produce whose goal is to reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, then cut them another 80 percent by 2050. Starting this November the state will begin auctioning carbon permits to companies that surpass the emissions limit. Because the national government, frankly, is cowtowing to it’s biggest funders from the depth and breadth of the energy industries, not much will happen in these energy mega-issue battles. But State and local governments are actually leading the way with 29 States implementing renewable energy portfolio standards and 42 states having interconnection standards for renewable and alternative energy distributed generation and net-metering. And that is the one hope for energy progress, which would make former President and Governor Ronald Reagan proud, by divesting authority out of Washington and let State and local governments meet the energy needs and aspirations of their populations.

As with most issues, Congress is currently gridlocked when it comes to energy and environmental policy. Perhaps this is a good state of affairs. The last time we had an explicit energy policy was in the late 1970s during the administration of President Jimmy Carter. In the aftermath of the OPEC embargo, President Carter argued that reducing America’s dependence on imported oil was the “moral equivalent of war.” His energy advisors then fashioned the nation’s first comprehensive energy policy that turned out to be a set of laws that distorted the marketplace and wasted billions of taxpayer dollars on impractical and uneconomical alternatives to conventional energy supplies.

The goals of the “National Energy Plan (NEP)” were to mandate efficiency in energy use, limit prices increases of all fuels, and allocate allegedly scarce energy resources to their perceived highest and best use. For example, natural gas was banned as a fuel for power generation or industrial boilers. (Not surprisingly, the coal industry was a big fan of the “fuel use act.”) Sometimes referred to as a "travesty in five acts," the NEP actually increased rather than decreased our dependence on foreign sources of supply.

When Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency, he famously declared that the “best energy policy was no energy policy.” During the Reagan years, most of the NEP was repealed or amended, and the so-called energy crisis went away as domestic production increased and prices fell.

The lesson of history is not that Congress should completely ignore energy issues. As a result of market forces and new technologies, domestic production of oil and gas has soared in recent years with a concomitant drop in energy imports. And these gains have occurred despite the clear anti-hydrocarbon bias of the Obama administration. In short, our newfound domestic energy abundance has turned a “problem” into an “opportunity.”

Without any new government subsidies, the oil and gas industry has created nearly 700,000 jobs over the past five years. No other high-wage industry comes close. Just as America today is the world’s leading coal exporter, in a decade we could become one of the world’s leading natural gas exporters. With a little encouragement on the policy front, tens of thousands of additional jobs can be created in the energy sector as well as billions of new tax revenue for federal, state and local governments.