Restricting access to America’s energy also causes us to deplete energy resources that other countries desperately need, to lift their people out of poverty. When we make it illegal to produce our abundant oil and natural gas resources, we create artificial scarcities in the face of rising demand. We send the price of energy and food soaring upward for the poorest families on Earth. We increase the prospect of conflicts, wars and revolutions, as poor people and nations battle one another for what limited resources do remain available. This is not merely unwise. It is morally wrong.

No other nation on Earth is so self-centered that it locks up its own energy – and then uses other countries’ resources … and demands that they produce more to meet our needs, which will continue to grow as our population and energy use increase. It is high time that we stopped acting that way.

America’s restrictive, anti-energy policies may be politically correct. They may be the result of demands by coastal and environmental activists – many of whom live in states that produce little (if any) energy, but are among our nation’s biggest consumers of oil and natural gas.

However, none of these considerations makes these policies any less intolerable, any less economically harmful, any less regressive and racially targeted in their consequences. It is time to reverse the decades’ of imprudent energy policies.

Members of the House Appropriations Subcommittee – and week later the full House of Representatives – will soon vote to continue these insane, nightmarish Jim Crow policies … or to remove the moratoria on offshore production, so that we can start the political and policy process that will take us back to responsible policies and affordable, reliable energy.

This energy, and the offshore lands where it is found, belong to all Americans. Access to these lands and resources is a basic civil right – and no party, president, politician, environmental group, community, state or company has the right to keep us from developing this energy and enjoying its countless benefits.

I urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to vote in favor of ending these intolerable drilling moratoria.