Chart courtesy of Environmental Trends at http://www.environmentaltrends.org/single/article/where-the-jobs-are.html

Not to long ago, I posted my long expressed thesis that the energy sector is the key to the revival of the American economy. I wrote:

Over and over again, we have posted about how opening up energy exploration and production in the US could have an immediate “shock” effect on the economy because hydrocarbon based energy touches all strata of the economy and does so all at once. Cheaper fuel leads to cheaper production costs of products, immediately has an impact on personal income and strengthens the balance sheet of all companies by lowering overall costs to do business. It also immediately increases employment in the E&P (exploration and production) and EPIC (engineering, procurement, installation and construction) sectors of the oil patch. Good, high paying jobs that could be created at the cost of a signature.

Erika Johnson at Hot Air points to supporting data:

Since the start of their tenure, the Obama administration has fallen over itself in its efforts to create jobs — “shovel-ready” jobs, “clean-energy” jobs, government jobs — all of which were brought into existence because the government wanted them to work, not because the productive free market called for them. Strangely enough, President Obama seemed surprised when those shovel-ready jobs “weren’t as shovel-ready as we thought,” and when those green jobs cost taxpayers millions of dollars a pop. And, try as the Obama administration might to foil the oil and gas industry with scant permitting and an increasing regulatory load in order to help enforce their environmental vision, you just can’t keep a good industry down…

In a nutshell, the overall U.S. economy has witnessed a net job loss since 2007, but the number of jobs in oil and gas extraction specifically has been moving right along — and imagine what that number might look like without the Obama administration’s various methods of hindering conventional energy production. However much President Obama cares to expound on the inherent virtue of clean energy, the fact is that government-funded green energy is where productive jobs go to die, while the employment trend in oil and gas is flourishing on its own.