President's speech a red flag for Montana energy jobs

President Obama got one thing right in his State of the Union address: What our country needs most is to create new, high-wage jobs. We know something about that in Montana, with tremendous job growth in our energy sector the last few years. And with our country’s massive, untapped coal, oil, and gas reserves, paired with vigorous growth in demand for energy worldwide, it doesn’t take an academician to figure out the best opportunity to create new jobs.

Unfortunately, once past the platitudes and on to the details, the President’s speech was a real disappointment and foreshadowed worrisome trends to come for our nation’s economy, energy supply, and job market.

It’s obvious the President is more keen to please his environmentalist cronies than he is to follow through on the rhetoric about creating jobs. In fact, several of the policies he outlined in his speech are bona fide job killers.

First and foremost, he’s proposing to impose a massive tax hike on the energy sector. He claimed in the speech that fossil fuel companies receive $4 billion in subsidies — that’s a gross mischaracterization and true only if you consider standard tax deductions (like your home mortgage interest deduction) to somehow be ‘subsidies’ or government handouts.

What he’s really proposing is to increase the tax burden paid by energy companies. Those taxes add up—in Montana, state property taxes make up nearly 10 percent of a household’s utility bill, for example.

Not only would higher energy taxes have obvious, negative impacts on the good-paying jobs in Montana’s energy sector, it would hurt every other sector as well as the price of energy rises across the board. Electricity-intensive industries, like agriculture and manufacturing, depend on affordable energy prices. Increasing the tax burden only serves to have those increased costs passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.

The President also hinted that the job-killing over-regulation by his Environmental Protection Agency is about to get even worse. Without the input or approval of Congress, he’s proposing to radically alter the way our electricity is produced and delivered. And based on the miserable failure this administration has had in implementing Obamacare, the prospect of a massive overhaul of our energy supply should send shivers up our spines.

By fiat, he’s already introduced regulations designed to shut down coal-fired power plants and to prevent the construction of new ones. And it appears additional overzealous regulations are on the horizon. The effect will ultimately be more-expensive electricity prices and the death of good jobs that won’t be replaced in the alternative energy sector.

Contrary to his rhetoric, an “all of the above” energy policy is not the reality in the Obama administration. Rather than let market forces drive down the cost consumers pay for their energy, his administration is dedicated to picking winners and losers, benefiting the few at the expense of most of us.

We really need to get serious about job growth. It’s one thing to talk about jobs in a speech, but the real significance is in implementing policies that are shown to produce results.

We also need to get serious about reducing emissions. We know that clean coal technology has the potential to dramatically reduce carbon emissions while supplying affordable energy to the world. Yet the Obama administration has imposed a de facto ban on coal technology development by making it all but impossible to construct new, state-of-the-art generators.

Perhaps the most frustrating part is the lost opportunity. Opportunity to create new careers for thousands of workers. Opportunity to supply the growing world demand for American-produced energy. Opportunity to truly become energy independent. Opportunity for Montana to enjoy the tremendous economic growth that would follow development of our energy resources. And for Montana, that’s a very big opportunity to lose.

Commissioner Kirk Bushman, of Billings, represents Southeastern Montana on the Public Service Commission.