I have posted in the past on how the USA is the only country in the world that forbids itself from exploring and exploiting its own natural resources of oil, shale, and natural gas.

This affects small business:
At NPR:
Lack Of Drilling Permits Hurts Small Energy Firms

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will meet with oil industry executives in Houma, La., on Monday. The big topic will be the government’s slow pace in issuing drilling permits for the Gulf of Mexico, despite the Obama administration lifting its deep-water drilling moratorium last month and the shallow-water moratorium in May.

It’s not the big oil companies hurting now. The Gulf of Mexico is just one sliver of their worldwide portfolios. It’s the smaller companies that rely more heavily on the Gulf. Among them is Hercules Offshore.

About 25 miles from Aransas Pass, Texas, the huge Hercules 205 shallow-water jack-up rig is sitting in about 100 feet of water. It’s not drilling any wells right now because Hercules’ customers can’t get permits.
…
Historically the government approved 10 to 15 shallow-water drilling permits a month. But now, that number has fallen to almost none.

How so?

Hercules Offshore has lost more than half of its stock market value since BP’s Deepwater Horizon accident last April, though the work Hercules is doing here isn’t nearly as complicated as drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf.

“They’re natural gas wells, not oil wells,” says Jim Noe, senior vice president, general counsel and chief compliance officer at Hercules Offshore.

“We’re using technology that we’ve been using for decades — safely and without incident,” he says.

It looked like the Obama administration recognized this, too — at first. The shallow-water moratorium lasted less than a month.

“And yet we’ve been facing what we’ve called a de facto moratorium because the Obama bureaucrats won’t issue permits,” Noe says.

Historically the government approved 10 to 15 shallow-water drilling permits a month. But now, that number has fallen to almost none.

Conservation groups want “a complete stop with permitting offshore drilling.”

The Obama administration is also proposing two punitive measures against the US oil & gas industry,

two massive tax hikes. First, he’d ban oil and gas companies from using the “Section 199″ tax credit, a measure for domestic manufacturers enacted in 2004 to boost US employment. (The Senate is set to vote this week on its version of the ban.) Second, he wants to end “dual capacity” protection for US energy firms.

Without this shield against double taxation on foreign revenues, American companies would be competing on an uneven global playing field.

This gives an advantage to other countries that are already drilling in the gulf,

legislative proposals such as the possible tax changes could exacerbate disadvantages already experienced by U.S. companies, making them less competitive than companies from other countries analyzed in that report. Yergin and Hobbs say that is because companies from countries such as Canada, China, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, and the United Kingdom pay less tax on repatriated income than do American companies. This in turn gives them a competitive advantage, which would presumably be expanded were the proposals being pursued in fact implemented.

while,

lawmakers would be slamming the very teachers, firemen and factory workers that they claim to want to help. And the fallout wouldn’t end there. Higher energy taxes would cost the US $341 billion in lost economic activity and $68 billion in wages over the next nine years.

Prof. Joseph Mason explains how this will cost the US over 150,000 jobs. Go read his articles here and here.