Rob Portman
Anyone who’s filled up a gas tank in recent days has suffered a real hit to the wallet. Gas prices are at record levels for this time of the year, stressing family budgets that have already been stretched thin.

But make no mistake about it: It’s not just a recent, seasonal issue. The problem’s been building.

On President Obama’s watch, the price of gas has increased by a staggering 94 percent. Gas prices reached an all-time high last year – $3.53 per gallon – and this week the average price is already higher, at nearly $3.70 per gallon. In 2011, the average family spent an astounding $4,155 on gas.

The American driver has been hard hit. So have we all as American consumers, because we buy products with built-in fuel costs incurred bringing those products to market.

So at a time when millions of American are struggling amid continued high unemployment, we need an energy policy that reduces our dependence on foreign oil and ensures a supply of secure, reliable and affordable energy.

We need to produce more. Expanding domestic production as much as possible is vital to helping bring down energy prices. Even though some of the new production won’t come online right away, it’ll show the oil markets that we will reduce our reliance on the OPEC cartel that controls oil prices. The more time Washington wastes by not acting quickly to expand production, the longer it will take to achieve lower gas prices for American consumers over the long term.

The White House has talked a good game on energy, but when push has come to shove – and not even taking into account the infamous Solyndra debacle – President Obama has been on the wrong side.

We’re a country rich in resources, but you wouldn’t know it from the president’s policies.

In 2010, he canceled lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and off the Mid-Atlantic coast, areas where we know there to be oil and natural gas. In 2011, he put forward a new five-year lease plan for 2012-2017 that reinstitutes a moratorium in the Atlantic and Pacific Outer Continental Shelves and halves the number of lease sales under the old plan. He’s slowed down permits for deepwater and shallow water drilling in the Gulf. He’s set to impose severe new regulations on oil refiners that will only further raise prices. His cap-and-trade plan having failed in the Senate, he’s doing an end run around the Congress by allowing the EPA to create a similar cap-and-tax regime on American businesses. The uncertainty about this is delaying construction of the first new refinery in the country in a generation.

Which brings us to the second problem with the Obama administration’s energy policies. These policies are killing jobs – jobs that Americans need in order to pay their gas bills.

A pro-growth energy strategy won’t only result in more secure, reliable and affordable energy. It’ll help create the jobs we need, especially in the manufacturing industry, which creates the products used in the drilling and transportation of oil and natural gas. There are now 469,000 unemployed workers in Ohio. According to a recent study, development of Ohio’s natural gas and oil-rich Utica Shale alone could create and support more than 200,000 jobs in the state.

The president seemed to be reversing course in his recent State of the Union address, calling for an “all-of-the-above” strategy on energy, i.e., one that includes fossil fuels. But less than a week earlier, he rejected the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring oil down from our closest ally, Canada, and more U.S. oil in the northern U.S. to refineries on the Gulf. Instead, that oil is now likely to go to China.

Keystone XL was also set to be one of the largest private-sector infrastructure projects in the country, creating tens of thousands of jobs, many of them in manufacturing. As a major manufacturing state, Ohio would have benefited economically as we build many of the parts needed to create and service pipelines.

Because the pipeline makes sense, I’m co-sponsoring bipartisan legislation approving the pipeline under the authority granted to the Congress by the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.

President Obama’s energy policies are both bad for the pocketbook and bad for our foreign policy. They ensure that we’ll be even more reliant on dangerous and volatile parts of the world for our future gas needs.

I fear that things will only get worse this summer as American families start to hit the road for vacation.

Americans deserve a different solution: a sensible national energy policy that stops our dangerous dependency on foreign oil and leads to more domestic production and prices we can afford at the gas pump.

Rob Portman is a United States Senator from Ohio.