Obama administration policies have caused “irreperable harm” to the Gulf Coast economy, stifling the energy sector and culling employment within it to a degree previously underestimated by the administration itself.

That is the conclusion drawn by Louisiana State University economics professor, Dr. Joseph Mason, author of a new critique of the Obama administration’s Inter-Agency Economic Report released last week estimating losses due to the deepwater drilling moratorium currently in effect.  According to Dr. Mason, that report understated the ban’s impact on job losses by as much as 60 percent.

During a conference call Tuesday, Mason criticized the administration’s methodology for calculating the economic effects of the ban, and said the administration used inflated, flawed logic to calculate its valuation of economic offsets—such as unemployment wages—and their counter effects on the economic downturn. He said the report was inaccurately rosy in describing the Gulf States’ economic recoveries following the BP spill.

“Those states have been irreparably harmed,” Mason said. “Essentially all of these economies have taken the summer off and are trying to get back to the baseline.”

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If President Obama’s Oval Office speech made one thing clear, it is that his administration and the activists who back it view the Gulf oil spill as simply an opportunity to advance their pre-existing agenda—which has nothing to do with cleaning up the Gulf, protecting the fragile coastal environment or fostering the region’s economy.

Although now overruled for the time being by a federal judge, the Obama administration’s May 27 order to stop all deep-water exploratory drilling in U.S. waters of the Gulf of Mexico for six months, pending the report of a commission investigating the causes of BP’s Deepwater Horizon accident, is a case in point.

Public and political reaction to the devastating oil release in the Gulf has revitalized a coalition of environmental and anti-energy lobbies that oppose not only deep-water drilling, but all offshore oil production and, in some cases, all use of fossil fuels. As usual, political opportunists have been quick to seize the moment.

“You don’t want to let a good crisis get away,” declares Athan Manuel, director of lands protection in the Sierra Club’s legislative office. The organization is urging a permanent moratorium on new offshore drilling.

Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, disputes industry claims that shallow-water drilling is much safer than deep-water drilling. The center wants the existing six-month moratorium extended to all offshore drilling.

Such lobbying already has born fruit. On June 8, the administration issued new safety standards for shallow-water drilling. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, “as many as 50 shallow-water drilling rigs that employ about 5,000 workers may need new permits in the next six weeks under the administration’s new review.”

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Yesterday’s announcements of slitting our own throat of domestic energy production gives cause to revisit who the man is and where he wants to take us.

Rahm Emanuel among others in the Obama administration are on record asserting their philosophy that no “crisis” should ever go to waste. This mentality, of course, carries the moral hazard of promoting “crises” in the news cycle, and as an operating mentality. We have seen this among green activists (including Obama appointees) for decades.

With crises being your strategic plan for hooks to impose an unpopular and radical agenda, you might even allow crises to develop where they could have been nipped into mere incidents. Who knows.

We do know that Obama has a record of words and now deeds declaring war on all sources of energy that work, including their domestic production: shale gas, coal, oil shale, and petroleum.

Barack Obama and his gloomy band seek to force you out of your lifestyle, meaning your freedoms, all of which they find intolerable and that you cannot be trusted with. Obama even noted in a speech that, in a world where he is president, we can’t eat what we want, drive what we want, or put our thermostat where we want (other than that, you are perfectly free to do what you wish…until further notice).

His “energy czar” later added policy meat to these very strange rhetorical bones when she told U.S. News that you shouldn’t even have the right to control your own energy use. But changing that, she comforted readers, will be a savings to you. They’re saving a fortune in India and other poor countries right now, for example.

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