Imagine that the price of food in America was prone to volatile increases of 50 percent or more in a given year. Now imagine that while people struggled to afford food, government bureaucrats went around setting limits on how much food some American farmers can grow, while radical anti-obesity crusaders sued other farmers across the country to seize their farmlands and declare them off-limits to crop production. Such an untenable situation would likely produce a popular revolt that dwarfed the Tea Party movement.

Yet that scenario is almost perfectly analogous to America’s current energy and environmental policies. Ambitious professional politicians and federal bureaucrats are working hand-in-glove with an $8 billion-a-year Big Green environmental lobby in an effort to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels. The result: lost jobs in the energy industry, skyrocketing utility costs, mind-numbing traffic jams, and a decline in critically needed domestic energy production.