It’s not at all clear which Barack Obama was standing before the White House press corps Friday. It certainly wasn’t the same one who stood before a meeting of Resources for the Future on Sept. 15, 2005, and declared: “But as we cut through all the talk and the politics in the energy debate, we can see what the debate is really about. We see the family that thinks twice about what they’ll spend at the grocery store this week, because they’ve been paying $40 to fill up the tank for the last month. We see the grandmother who isn’t sure how she’ll make her Social Security check cover January’s heating bill. The autoworker that isn’t sure what the future at Ford holds for him. And the mother who sees turmoil in the Middle East and worries that someday her son might have to fight to secure our oil supply. Ultimately, we see a nation that cannot control its future as long as it cannot control the source of energy that keeps it running.”

The 2005 Obama worried about the devastating economic impact that high energy prices have on people from all walks of life. But Friday’s Obama has seemed determined to make the price of gas go up as much as possible since his first day on the job in January 2009. He dramatically slowed, then completely stopped the federal government’s issuance of drilling permits on federal lands and in offshore waters. He also slowed down the government auctions of leases for energy exploration on other federal lands. And since the Deepwater Horizon disaster last year, only two permits have been issued — both within the last month — to enable drilling to resume in the Gulf of Mexico, which supplies a third of U.S. oil and natural gas needs. He has withdrawn previously issued permits for drilling in Alaska and put millions of acres of federal land in the lower 48 states off-limits to future oil exploration.