Obama on oil, in his own words

From today’s lackluster press conference:

We can’t place our long-term bets on a finite resource that we only control 2 percent of, especially a resource that’s vulnerable to hurricanes, war, and political turmoil. Beyond increased domestic production, if we want to secure our long-term prosperity and protect the American people from more severe oil shocks in the future, the way to do it is to gradually reduce demand and then do everything we can to break our dependence on oil.

Quite a bit to unpack in there. First, we don’t know what percentage of the world’s oil supply we control, because Obama and his lefty allies have been preventing exploration in ANWR for years, and putting whole other sections of the country on shore and off shore, off limits for exploration as well. Our oil supply would be less vulnerable to hurricanes and the like if the greens would allow more on shore domestic oil exploration and production, but they have been blocking that for years. That second sentence affirms the ideas Obama expresses in his 2008 “skyrocket” quote on electricity. How do you reduce demand? The easiest way is to establish policies that cause prices to go up. And that’s what he has done.

As for the rest of the press conference, I didn’t see all of it, but what I did see was unimpressive. At one point he halfheartedly lauded the Japanese people’s resilience, which is stronger that outsiders probably understand, and said Japan would rebuild “hopefully with American help.” Hopefully? They’re one of our strongest allies. There should be no “hopefully” about it: America will help.