In a move intended to appease his far-left base, Barack Obama has decided to delay the creation of as many as 200,000 jobs in the energy industry.

President Obama’s United States Department of Agriculture has delayed shale gas drilling in Ohio for up to six months by cancelling a mineral lease auction for Wayne National Forest (WNF). The move was taken in deference to environmentalists, on the pretext of studying the effects of hydraulic fracturing…

The Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program (OOGEEP) recently estimated that drilling in the Utica shale, which is affected by the suspension of the mineral lease auctions, would produce up 204,500 jobs by 2015.

We could be putting 200,000 Americans back to work, and we could start immediately. But we won’t, because Barack Obama finds it more important to appease his far-left base than put America back to work.

“The President’s plan is to simply say ‘no’ to new energy production,” House Natural Resources Committee chairman Doc Hastings, R-Wash, said to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar during a hearing pertaining to hydraulic fracturing. “It’s a plan that is sending American jobs overseas, forfeiting new revenue, and denying access to American energy that would lessen our dependence on hostile Middle Eastern oil.”

Indeed. How sad it is that we have a president more concerned with his own campaign contributions than the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of American workers.

Hey, Occupy Wall Street? How about protesting this?

But of course they won’t. The overwhelming majority of them are simply left-wing activists — the same kind Obama is trying to appease with this delay of job creation. It’s not about American workers; it’s about left-wing policies.