Has any politician ever been more wrong than Barack Obama was about U.S. oil production and energy independence? Based on the latest report from the International Energy Agency, the answer is an unequivocal no.
On Tuesday, oil prices fell for the 12th consecutive decline. And amid that decline, the International Energy Agency forecasts that the U.S. will account for 75% of the growth in global oil production through 2025.
That’s a stunning finding that shows how dynamic the domestic oil and gas industry has become.
Oil Production Skyrockets
Crude oil production in the U.S. has climbed more than 67% in just the past six years. And the Department of Energy expects it will climb an additional 11% next year.
Earlier this year, U.S. production hit 11 million barrels a day, surpassing Russia as the world’s largest oil producer, after having blown past Saudi Arabia in February.
This explosion in domestic oil production is largely due to fracking, which has opened vast expanses of once-inaccessible crude oil.
It was also never supposed to happen.
At least not if you’d been listening to President Barack Obama. For eight years, Obama told the country over and over again that the U.S. would forever be dependent on foreign countries for oil.
And that the only hope for energy independence was to heavily subsidize “renewable energy” like wind and solar.
Obama’s mantra was that the U.S. had just 2% of the world’s oil reserves, but consumed 20% of the world’s oil. There was literally no way, he claimed, that the U.S. could drill its way out of oil dependency.
Just 2% of the World’s Oil?
When he was first running for president in 2008, for example, Obama gave a speech in which he said: “If we opened up and drilled on every single square inch of our land and our shores, we would still find only 3% of the world’s oil reserves — 3% for a country that uses 25% of the world’s oil.”
He’d repeat that claim dozens of times in the White House, although the numbers would sometimes change a little. Here’s a small sampling drawn from the White House archives:
- “We have less than 2% of the world’s oil reserves, but are responsible for more than 20% of world consumption.”
- “Even if we tap every single reserve available to us, we can’t escape the fact that we only control 2% of the world’s oil, but we consume over a quarter of the world’s oil.”
- “We can’t place our long-term bets on a finite resource that we only control 2% of — especially a resource that’s vulnerable to hurricanes, war, and political turmoil.”
- “I give out this statistic all the time, and forgive me for repeating it again: America holds about 2% of the world’s proven oil reserves. What that means is, is that even if we drilled every drop of oil out of every single one of the reserves that we possess — offshore and onshore — it still wouldn’t be enough to meet our long-term needs.”
- “We consume about 25% of the world’s oil. We only have 2% of the reserves. Even if we doubled U.S. oil production, we’re still really short.”
- “With only 2% of the world’s oil reserves, we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices.”
- “We have less than 2% of the world’s oil reserves, but are responsible for more than 20% of world consumption.”
Pushing ‘Clean’ Energy
At the time, people who knew what they were talking about knew this claim was utterly false. IBD reported in 2012 that Obama was only counting a tiny fraction of the oil in the U.S. The actual amount of oil under U.S. land and sea was 60 times what Obama claimed.
Not all of that was recoverable at current prices. But “recoverable” is a highly flexible term. It’s based on oil prices and the cost of getting it out of the ground. The fracking revolution dramatically redefined the term recoverable because it made vast oil supplies accessible that once were once economically off-limits.
So why would Obama mislead the country throughout his presidency? Because he was determined to force the country to dump billions of taxpayer subsidies on “renewable” energy, and needed a reason to justify it.
Yet all along, the truth was that the U.S. could be a global energy powerhouse. Now, with President Donald Trump in the White House calling for U.S. energy dominance, everyone knows that to be the case.
Still, someone should ask Obama to apologize for his yearslong energy deception.
Read more at IBD
Al Obama did for his eight years as a Dictator was to Lie to the American Public which he did everyday for 2920 days in the oval office now he belongs in prison and all his judges working as janitors
I know I’m repeating myself, but the bloke did promise “hoke and chains”.