(This post may contain disputed claims. We make no assertions as to the validity of the information presented by our Opinion Columnist. We are an opinion blog, not a traditional news outlet, and this post should be treated as such. Enjoy.)During an event on Tuesday night, former President Barack Obama took credit for the recent oil boom in the United States. However, the former president of Shell Oil Company has now come forward with a brutal reality check for the Narcissist in Chief, essentially dousing Obama’s claims in gasoline and lighting a match.
During an event hosted by Rice University’s Baker Institute on Tuesday night, former President Barack Obama claimed that he was responsible for America’s recent oil boom. “American energy production — you wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president,” Obama said. “That whole, suddenly America’s, like, the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas — that was me, people… just say thank you.”
However, former president of Shell Oil Company John Hofmeister told Fox News that Obama had nothing to do with America’s increased oil production and actually frustrated many areas of the energy sector. “The facts are the facts. And, yes, the production did increase throughout his term,” Hofmeister said on “Fox & Friends” Thursday. “But, frankly, he had nothing to do with it.”
“This was production in states like Texas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado — North Dakota, in particular,” explained Hofmeister. “And these were all state decisions made with industry applications for permits. The federal government had no role.”
“If anything, he was trying to frustrate the efforts by taking federal lands off of the availability list — putting them just, no more drilling. He shut down the Gulf of Mexico for a period of six months,” added the oil tycoon. “[He] changed the regulations from an average of 60 to 80 pages per permit to 600 to 800 pages per permit.”
“He also never approved the Keystone XL pipeline after dangling all the potential customers for eight years. And it was in the eighth year when he said no Keystone Pipeline,” said Hofmeister. “I would say that he was not a leader when it comes to energy.”
In fact, it was President Donald Trump who got rid of the Obama-era regulations on public land in February 2018, which cleared a path for expanded oil and gas drilling. Trump predicted way back in March that oil production would really take off after his slashing of regulations, and he was right.
U.S. oil production nearly doubled between 2009, when Obama took office, to 2016. Natural gas production shot up around 50 percent in that time. However, the boom in production almost exclusively took place on state and private lands where the Obama administration had little to no control.
Republicans criticized Obama for lagging oil and gas production on federally-managed lands, which largely stagnated while production elsewhere boomed due to hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling.
Obama did sign legislation in late 2015 ending the decades-old ban on crude oil exports, but at the same time imposed regulations and pursued international policies aiming to move the world away from fossil fuels in the name of fighting global warming.
Obama joined the Paris Agreement in 2016, promising to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent. The Paris accords aimed to keep future global warming below 2 degrees Celsius by 2100 through cutting fossil fuel use, including oil. President Donald Trump plans on leaving the Paris accord as soon as 2020, and his administration has rolled back Obama-era policies seen as restricting oil and gas production. [Source: The Daily Caller]
Ironically, Barack Obama continues to take credit for all of Donald Trump’s accomplishments, all while “resisting” his presidency and standing in opposition to his every move. But you simply cannot have it both ways.
Either Trump is doing such a fantastic job that his predecessor now wishes he was responsible for all the progress being made, or Trump is doing such a terrible job that no one in their right mind would want to touch his administration’s developments with a ten-foot pole. Take your pick, Obama.
