By Thomas J. Donohue
The Environmental Protection Agency has the important charge of keeping our water safe and our air clean. It’s a mission supported by the business community—and collectively, we’ve invested $1.5 trillion over the last 30 years to improve the environment. What we don’t support are EPA rules and edicts that are driven by ideology, not science; trample the rights of states, businesses, and citizens; and undermine the economy and job creation.

By JAMES L. JONES and JASON S. GRUMET
AS oil and gasoline prices rise, political pressure to tap the roughly 700 million barrels in the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve is building, including among some in Congress. The global oil market is fundamentally strained and suffering from an array of unwelcome but unremarkable problems. Yet the oil reserve is neither designed nor well equipped to address these chronic weaknesses. Instead it should be preserved to address an emergency disruption in supply.

The Keystone XL pipeline—an approximately $7-billion project that complements the original Keystone Pipeline and nearly doubles the size and capacity of the system with an extension to the Gulf Coast—has been in the planning stages since 2008. This additional energy source from our North American Free Trade Agreement

No one could have predicted that oil prices would rise to today’s levels. Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, says they are irrationally high, pointing out that world demand is lower than the available supply and that Saudi oil inventories around the world are largely untapped. The “irrational” cause, of course, is fear of a war with Iran. But it would also have been unpredictable that a 47 percent hike in oil prices since November 2010 would not cause a major slowdown in the U.S. economy. One reason it hasn’t might well be the rise of shale gas.

The world was reinvented in the 1970s by soaring oil prices and massive transfers of national wealth. It could be again if the price of petroleum crashes -- a real possibility given the amazing estimates about the new gas and oil reserves on the North American continent. The Canadian tar sands, deepwater exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, horizontal drilling off the eastern and western American coastlines, fracking in once-untapped sites in North Dakota, and new pipelines from Alaska and Canada could within a decade double North American gas and oil production.

Welcome to Oklahoma, President Obama. We hope you develop a better understanding of the oil and gas industry, one of the largest and most vibrant sectors in the United States, during your visit. As Americans, we share a mutual desire to power our nation with homegrown energy sources. We join you in wanting to secure our energy future by lessening our dangerous dependency on imported oil.

Yes, of course, presidents have no direct control over gas prices. But the American people know something about this president and his disdain for oil. The “fuel of the past,” he contemptuously calls it. To the American worker who doesn’t commute by government motorcade and is getting fleeced every week at the pump, oil seems very much a fuel of the present — and of the foreseeable future.

By LINDSEY GRAHAM

President Barack Obama's lack of direction on energy policy is costing us dearly at the pump and in the pocket. Nowhere is his lack of a vision more evident than in his decision to brazenly disregard our nation's energy security in favor of short-term politics on the Keystone XL pipeline.

It is fashionable now to rant about the oil and natural gas industry. It places a financial burden on consumers; it disregards safety in offshore drilling; it engages in risky hydraulic fracturing for shale oil and gas that could pollute aquifers; it trivializes renewable energy sources; it uses its financial power to gain inordinate influence with policymakers and it is heavily subsidized. Such claims may appeal to the anti-fossil fuel crowd in the White House who want to put oil and gas companies out of business.

Creativity and common sense have prevailed in the decision by TransCanada to push ahead with a portion of its controversial Keystone XL Pipeline from Cushing, Okla., to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast.