Senator Bond is soon on his way out of the U.S. Senate after serving there since 1987, and he’s not going out quietly.

Bond, speaking on the Senate floor, bemoaned an action by the Obama Administration this week.

“The Administration announced the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast to be ‘off limits’ to any new offshore drilling for the next five years. In other words, the Obama Administration decided to deny Americans new domestic energy supplies, deny Americans new jobs and make America’s energy prices rise,” Bond said.

Bond believes thousands of new jobs would have been created if new drilling were allowed in those areas in the coming years.

“Preventing spills must be a top priority. However, arbitrarily… arbitrarily closing off our own domestic supplies is not the answer,” Bond said. “This death blow to offshore drilling will only make us more dependent on OPEC, Middle Eastern countries, hostile regimes that mean us harm.”

Bond says regulations by the EPA on other fuel sources are hampering economic growth, and says that approach is counter-productive.

“As we approach changing our energy policy, while we all want to protect the environment, and we must, we have to ensure that the policies we choose will not have adverse consequences to economic growth,” Bond said. “We need to develop affordable, homegrown, and clean energy solutions to help push our nations toward a more independent and environmentally friendly future.”

He says he sees immediate opportunities in the realms of nuclear and hydroelectric power, and more development could help grow wind and solar power as well. He wants to see Congress renew tax cuts for biofuel producers. He says in Missouri, there’s a great opportunity for biomass that can be converted to energy.

“A University of Missouri study found that Missouri’s two and a half million acres of corn and five million acres of soybeans produce a combined 13 million tons of dry crop residue each year; which can be converted into electric energy, or through cellulosic operation, into fuels,” Bond said.

Bond also told his fellow Senators that many other states could see the same growth in this industry, especially in the Midwest, if Congress helped see in the creation of the infrastructure needed to make it a viable endeavor.

 “Our forests alone can potentially provide 150 million tons of wood residue from scrub timber annually on a renewable basis. Together, that is a lot of biomass feedstock that’s homegrown and is carbon natural,” Bond said.

AUDIO: Ryan Famuliner reports [1 min MP3]