Not all fossil fuels are created equal. President Barack Obama praised his Paris agreement and his EPA’s Clean Power Plan, but had no such kind words for the one thing that has actually reduced carbon emissions in the U.S. and elsewhere – natural gas.

In fact, both the Paris agreement and the CPP work against the benefits that could be derived from natural gas, both here and abroad.

Ned Mamula and Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute, said the natural gas revolution holds great promise for our energy future.

“Thanks to this revolution, powered by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, natural gas has achieved rock-star status in the U.S. energy panoply,” the wrote. “It’s abundant and clean; relative to coal, it gives twice the energy bang for the carbon dioxide buck; it’s transportable and very affordable. In fact, we have the cheapest natural gas on Earth. Economics and geoscience have conspired to make it a major fuel for the foreseeable future. There is so much that it will likely be replaced by some unforeseeable future technology rather than being priced out by scarcity.”

Major industry sectors are already converting to natural gas, which is cleaner than the alternatives.

As Mamula and Michaels note: “Big railroads like Warren Buffet’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe are equipping locomotive lashups with huge natural-gas ‘tenders.’ Big trucking companies are outfitting experimental fleets. Some day, the space problem will be solved for its use in personal cars that are currently range-limited by bulky tanks. We are probably about to become the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG) – and we could continue to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions from electrical generation, the largest single source, because a gas-fired power plant is simpler, cheaper and easier to operate than a coal burner.”

But Obama’s policies, including the CPP, stand in the way of converting coal power plants to natural gas.

“The original version largely replaced coal with gas for electrical generation…” they wrote. “But during the year the CPP was in draft form, Obama gave in to the radical environmentalists. When the CPP came out in final form last June, it became clear that the switch from coal to gas was largely over. Early last year, the fraction of our power produced by gas reached 31 percent. The CPP caps it at 33 percent, basically the same figure.”

Instead, the CPP calls for renewable power resources that simply aren’t up to the job yet – and far more expensive than the natural gas alternative.

“In the final analysis, renewable-energy hawks should endorse the star status of natural gas,” Mamula and Michaels wrote. “Wind and solar power fluctuate – the wind doesn’t always blow; the sun doesn’t always shine – and natural gas is far more efficient than any other fuel when it comes to filling in those gaps.”

In the past, the EPA has looked upon natural gas as an ideal “bridge fuel,” which can give us cleaner power as we wait for renewables to catch up.

It is.

But Obama doesn’t see it that way.