The oil and natural-gas industry probably won’t ever get a thank-you card from President Obama, but he has a few big reasons to be grateful for the fossil-fuel boom.
America’s vast resources of oil and natural gas have enabled Obama to move forward on aggressive policies, including tougher environmental rules and Iranian oil sanctions, which he would not have been able to do nearly as effectively without them.
The International Energy Agency predicts the U.S. will surpass Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest oil-producer in 2015; and, by the end of this year, the Energy Information Administration says we’ll surpass Russia as the biggest natural-gas producer.
“I’ve joked before that for the last 30 years, our national energy policy has been implicitly predicated on a low-cost, trustable supply of natural gas,” said Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, who advised Obama in his transition to the presidency in 2008. “It is incredibly fortunate that it showed up in time.”
As I’ve noted elsewhere, this is a case of the America that works rescuing the one that doesn’t.