Happy coincidence underlies Obama's oil and gas boasts

Oct. 13, 2014
American political custom allows presidents to take credit for whatever economic joy arises while they're in office.

American political custom allows presidents to take credit for whatever economic joy arises while they're in office.

Bill Clinton, for example, raised tax rates to make bond traders happy and received praise for fostering prosperity, which in fact resulted at least as much from Reagan-era deregulation and a dot-com bubble that would have happened-and eventually burst-no matter who occupied the White House.

When Barack Obama praises himself for an oil and gas supply boom, however, the role of happy coincidence cannot be ignored.

Obama has done nothing to inspire or support development of unconventional hydrocarbon resources. Governmental support for technologies driving the bonanza predates his administration.

Indeed, Obama and the activists he placed in high Executive Branch positions consistently work against the production of oil and gas.

Leasing and permitting of federal acreage are, by recent standards, slow. Government agencies are moving toward regulation of hydraulic fracturing and of air emissions from drillsites and natural gas processing and transportation systems.

In each year of his presidency, Obama has proposed budgets that would deny oil and gas companies the use of longstanding tax preferences, mischaracterizing them as subsidies, and raise costs of production.

Other examples exist, all redolent of hostility toward the expansion of oil supply on full display in Obama's refusal to approve the Keystone XL pipeline's border crossing.

None of that keeps the president from using oil and gas as props for political marketing.

"As soon as I came into office, we upped our investments in American energy to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and strengthen our own energy security," he said during an Oct. 2 speech on the economy at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. "And today, the number-one oil and gas producer in the world is no longer Russia or Saudi Arabia. It's America."

Federal spending on solar, wind, and biofuels and elevation of the country's stature as an oil producer have no causal connection, of course. They just happened at the same time.