In Maine, the Tea Party-backed Republican governor canceled a project to ease congestion along the Route 1 corridor after protesters complained it was part of the United Nations plot. Similar opposition helped doom a high-speed train line in Florida. And more than a dozen cities, towns and counties, under new pressure, have cut off financing for a program that offers expertise on how to measure and cut carbon emissions.

“It sounds a little on the weird side, but we’ve found we ignore it at our own peril,” said George Homewood, a vice president of the American Planning Association’s chapter in Virginia.

The protests date to 1992 when the United Nations passed a sweeping, but nonbinding, 100-plus-page resolution called Agenda 21 that was designed to encourage nations to use fewer resources and conserve open land by steering development to already dense areas. They have gained momentum in the past two years because of the emergence of the Tea Party movement, harnessing its suspicion about government power and belief that man-made global warming is a hoax.

President Obama’s heavy-handed regulation of the booming old-energy economy—the moratorium on offshore drilling following the BP spoil, the decision to block the Keystone XL Pipeline, and the prospect of a fracking ban—and his embrace of green-energy policies has played well in the solidly Democratic post-industrial coastal economies that he also depends on for fund-raising. But it’s left him with few friends in the energy belt that spans the Great Plains, the Gulf Coast, Appalachia and now some parts of the old rustbelt, despite his election-year claims of an “all-of-the-above” energy policy.

It’s a far cry from Bill Clinton, whose close ties with Great Plains and Gulf Coast Democrats and energy producers there helped him twice carry Louisiana, Kentucky and West Virginia—all states that appear to be solidly behind Romney this year. [which makes Obama's phrase 'winning the future' even more interesting - B]

Today, Democratic senators in regions that depend on fossil fuels are becoming an endangered species. Over the past two years, Virginia’s Jim Webb and Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad, both from booming North Dakota, have announced their retirement or retired, while Montana’s Jon Tester has distanced himself from the president as he faces a difficult re-election fight. And that diminishing presence in turn means less intra-party resistance to any potential second-term plans to cut the burgeoning fossil-fuel business to size.

The administration’s hostility to the dirty business of energy, and the sector’s fear of new bans or regulations in a second Obama term that would gut the industry were perhaps best captured by the then-EPA administrator who claimed Administration policy was to “crucify” fossil fuel.

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Sixty-percent of the electricity in Los Angeles, a key bastion of Obama support, comes from coal-fired plants in Utah and Arizona; much of the natural gas that provides nearly half of the power for California’s grid is imported.

Nowhere is the element of choice inherent in energy policy more evident than in California, home to five of the nation’s twelve largest oil fields and energy reserves equal to those of Nigeria, the world’s tenth-largest producer. As high-paying energy jobs swell payrolls in the Great Plains, the Intermountain West and parts of the Gulf, the Golden State has double-digit unemployment, a collapsed inland economy and a series of bankrupt municipalities. Amidst a great national energy boom, California’s energy production has remained stunted even as the state’s draconian “renewable” energy mandates are slated to drive up its already high electricity rates. The state’s high cost of energy has impacted industry: despite its vast human and natural resources, the Golden State, with 12 percent of the nation’s population received barely 2 percent of the country’s manufacturing expansions last year.

Such inattention to California’s resources may be popular in wealthy precincts of Silicon Valley, San Francisco and west Los Angeles, but the state’s green approach has helped place traditionally manufacturing-oriented communities such as Oakland, east Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Stockton in deep distress. Despite central California’s vast deposits of oil and gas, unemployment rates in some oil-rich areas there are over 15 and sometimes even 20 percent.

“As economic forecaster Bill Watkins recently told an audience in hard-hit Santa Maria: ‘If you were in Texas, you’d be rich.’”