Dramatically increasing the production of domestic natural gas, oil and coal offers the United States its best opportunity to create sustainable jobs, but political wrangling stands in the way of achieving that goal, according to a new report from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

“The impediments to realizing these economic benefits are no longer technology- or resource-based. They are virtually all political,” said Digital Power Group CEO Mark P. Mills, who authored the report. “Only a major energy policy reset, one that takes into account the sweeping technological, economic and demographic changes that have occurred over the past several decades, will spur a fiscal recovery, a manufacturing revival, and even balanced budgets.”

In the first in a series of reports issued by the Power and Growth Initiative earlier this year, Mills wrote that hundreds of thousands of jobs have been created and billions of tax dollars generated from unconventional plays in North America (see Shale Daily, July 10). Policymakers need to capitalize on the further potential for job creation, trade and economic development that North American energy resources offer, he said.

In this second report, Mills identified specific steps that he said U.S. policymakers must take to realize three to five million high-paying jobs and $3-7 trillion of revenue that tapping the nation’s newly accessible energy resource could make possible.

“The United States can quite literally drill, dig, build, and ship its way out of the current economic and jobs malaise,” Mills wrote. “But we can do so only if the nation adopts new energy policies that reflect the technological, economic, and demographic realities of 2012.”

According to the report, the president and Congress should:

The report also recommend that legal challenges to development “be limited to those whose legal rights will be directly and adversely affected,” plaintiffs be required to pay for legal action dismissed on frivolous grounds, and federal lands currently deemed off-limits to energy development opened up for exploration. To encourage innovation, the research and development tax credit should be made permanent, Mills said.