Republicans are often accused of being ideologically inflexible, but when it comes to being pigheaded, the man in the Oval Office takes the cake. President Obama refuses to budge on his belief that Americans must be forced to stop using fossil fuels like oil, gas and natural gas as soon as possible and to instead begin depending on clean energy. In his own words, the Obama policy means “electricity prices must necessarily skyrocket.” Obama’s rigidity on energy policy is also an obstacle to economic recovery. The unemployment rate has been above 9 percent during most of his tenure in office, and there are multiplying signs that it could go back into double digits in coming months. Everything Obama has tried — including his $757 billion economic stimulus package, massively expanding federal regulation of the economy, record-setting levels of federal spending, bailing out Wall Street and Detroit, funding clean energy fiascos like Solyndra — has failed to put America back to work. In many respects, Obama’s policies have made things worse.

The saddest part of this, however, is that Obama could turn things around tomorrow, and he wouldn’t even have to get an act of Congress to make it happen. He only needs to instruct his Environmental Protection Agency administrator and interior secretary to stop suffocating the American oil and gas industry. Five steps would be required: re-opening the U.S. outer continental shelf to exploration and production of oil and natural gas, expediting pending exploration and drilling permits in the Arctic region, removing unnecessary bureaucratic impediments to exploration and production on federal lands, approving the Keystone XL pipeline to bring oil from Canada to the U.S., and admitting that hydraulic fracturing — aka “fracking” — is environmentally safe and the key to unlocking vast new resources that can make America the Saudi Arabia of energy for the 21st century.