Throughout this summer we documented that while the rest of the world has been busy developing their own natural resources to increase their power production, the United States has been moving in the exact opposite direction. A big part of the left’s game plan has been a coordinated nationwide effort to block construction on all power plants. Now the left is using that same tactic to block all resource development in Alaska. Remember that line Speaker Pelosi peddled out this summer … “use it or lose it” … well what Pelosi fails to mention are all the lawsuits from the enviro/left blocking energy companies from using their leases. And the situation just got worse. Institute for Energy Research president Thomas Pyle reports:

In just a few short weeks, numbers compiled by the federal government will show that for every 10 barrels of oil our nation consumed this year, 6.5 barrels came from a foreign country. Thanks to a ruling handed down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, the numbers for 2009 will probably be a whole lot worse.

That’s because late last month, the Ninth Circuit took the extraordinary step of stopping congressionally approved, federally leased energy exploration in Alaska’s remote Beaufort Sea, citing the possibility that travel routes of bowhead whales may be diverted as a result of it. The upshot? The U.S. economy lost out on hundreds of thousands of new jobs and billions of barrels of new domestic energy supply. But at least we saved the whales from having to take a detour.

According to the Department of the Interior, the number of suits filed in federal court to delay, defer or outright deny the development of domestic energy resources has grown more than 700 percent in the past decade; from 167 protests per year between 1997 and 2000, to 1,180 a year from then until now. And because petitioners don’t actually have to win the case to delay energy development ad infinitum, why would anyone stop?

In ten years when U.S. energy costs are crippling the economy, lets all remember who to blame.