If You Think Solyndra Was A Waste Of Money...
01/13/2016 06:25 PM ET
Energy: There's
no shortage of points to pick apart in the president's final State of
the Union, as we've done above. But one deserves close scrutiny: Obama's
claim that he "reinvented our energy sector."
In the middle of a lengthy section of a speech spent patting himself on the back, Obama talked about how successful his energy policies have been.
"Listen," he said, "seven years ago we made the single biggest investment in clean energy in our history." Then he went on to list "the results":
Wind power is cheaper, solar panels are a fixture on more rooftops, oil imports dropped by almost 60% and "we cut carbon pollution more than any other country on Earth." And then he added, to self-satisfied chuckles on the Democratic side of the aisle: "Gas under 2 bucks a gallon ain't bad, either."
But up until very recently, Obama was telling the country that low gas prices were an impossibility. "We can't just drill our way to lower gas prices," was his mantra for years. He was emphatic about it.
"Anyone who says we can drill our way out of this problem does not know what they are talking about, or does not know the truth," he said at a 2012 event in New Hampshire.
The reason, he said, was that we use 25% of the world's energy but have just 3% of the oil reserves. So the only solution was mandatory conservation and spending billions on the "energy of the future."
Turns out it was Obama who didn't know what he was talking about. We did, in fact, "drill our way" to lower gas prices. Thanks to fracking, oil companies are now able to produce vast amounts of previously unrecoverable oil.
In the past seven years, domestic oil production shot up a stunning 77%, according to the Energy Information Administration, making the U.S. the biggest oil producer in the world.
That's why gas prices are low today. And why oil imports have dropped so sharply. And none of it had anything to do with Obama, who tried to hamper oil production whenever he could — blocking Keystone, restrictions on federal lands, EPA attempts to hinder fracking.
Indeed, moments after bragging about low energy prices, Obama said he'd push to raise them, "to change the way we manage our oil and coal resources so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet."
Fracking
is also why we've cut carbon emissions, because it sharply lowered the
price of natural gas, which in turn let power plants switch from
carbon-heavy coal to low-carbon gas.
Yes, Obama did pour billions of dollars into wind and solar subsidies, and various state governments added still more to sweeten the pot. And what did the country get for all that money?
Solar and wind still account for just 24% of renewable energy supplies and a tiny 2% of total energy production, government data show.
And, incredibly, more than half of the gains in solar and wind under Obama were offset by declines in hydroelectric power — a clean, renewable energy source that environmentalists happen to detest.
So after spending billions subsidizing solar and wind, the share of our energy that comes from renewables is the same as it was when Obama took office.
Exactly the same.
The U.S. has a bright energy future despite Obama, not because of him.
In the middle of a lengthy section of a speech spent patting himself on the back, Obama talked about how successful his energy policies have been.
"Listen," he said, "seven years ago we made the single biggest investment in clean energy in our history." Then he went on to list "the results":
Wind power is cheaper, solar panels are a fixture on more rooftops, oil imports dropped by almost 60% and "we cut carbon pollution more than any other country on Earth." And then he added, to self-satisfied chuckles on the Democratic side of the aisle: "Gas under 2 bucks a gallon ain't bad, either."
But up until very recently, Obama was telling the country that low gas prices were an impossibility. "We can't just drill our way to lower gas prices," was his mantra for years. He was emphatic about it.
"Anyone who says we can drill our way out of this problem does not know what they are talking about, or does not know the truth," he said at a 2012 event in New Hampshire.
The reason, he said, was that we use 25% of the world's energy but have just 3% of the oil reserves. So the only solution was mandatory conservation and spending billions on the "energy of the future."
Turns out it was Obama who didn't know what he was talking about. We did, in fact, "drill our way" to lower gas prices. Thanks to fracking, oil companies are now able to produce vast amounts of previously unrecoverable oil.
In the past seven years, domestic oil production shot up a stunning 77%, according to the Energy Information Administration, making the U.S. the biggest oil producer in the world.
That's why gas prices are low today. And why oil imports have dropped so sharply. And none of it had anything to do with Obama, who tried to hamper oil production whenever he could — blocking Keystone, restrictions on federal lands, EPA attempts to hinder fracking.
Indeed, moments after bragging about low energy prices, Obama said he'd push to raise them, "to change the way we manage our oil and coal resources so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet."
An oil fracking site pulling crude near Walden, Wyoming, in July, 2015. View Enlarged Image
Yes, Obama did pour billions of dollars into wind and solar subsidies, and various state governments added still more to sweeten the pot. And what did the country get for all that money?
Solar and wind still account for just 24% of renewable energy supplies and a tiny 2% of total energy production, government data show.
And, incredibly, more than half of the gains in solar and wind under Obama were offset by declines in hydroelectric power — a clean, renewable energy source that environmentalists happen to detest.
So after spending billions subsidizing solar and wind, the share of our energy that comes from renewables is the same as it was when Obama took office.
Exactly the same.
The U.S. has a bright energy future despite Obama, not because of him.
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