The domestic oil and gas boom is rolling on, with no end of positive effects for the American economy. At the official end of the recession, in June 2009, we pumped 158.266 million barrels of oil that month. In November 2013, we pumped 233.051 million barrels, a 47.2 percent increase. This has led directly to much less imported oil, a much improved balance of trade, and a less influential OPEC.
But as Investor’s Business Daily points out, the economic benefits of the energy boom spread far beyond the oil industry into the economy as a whole. Jobs in the oil and gas fields are up about 40 percent since the end of the recession, and the ten states that are seeing substantially rising hydrocarbon production all have had job growth above the national average. And as IBD explains, “These jobs, moreover, are ‘sticky’ — anchored in the local economy and ranging from information services to training, health care, housing, education and related manufacturing.” North Dakota, battening on the rich oil resources of the Bakken Shield, has the lowest unemployment rate in the country.
And low-cost energy is attracting foreign investment. “The boom has also attracted a similar scale of new foreign direct investment,” IBD reports. “Because of low-cost energy abundance, 100 factories are set to come on line by 2017. When all are up and running, another $300 billion will be pumped into GDP and 1 million more jobs created.”
The Obama administration, naturally, is taking entirely undeserved credit for this, for its policies have slowed the oil and gas boom to the extent possible. Other Democrats, with the president’s blessing, have also been impeding oil and gas drilling. While Pennsylvania has been exploiting the vast gas reserves of the Marcellus shale, Governor Andrew Cuomo in neighboring New York has decided to let deeply depressed upstate go on being deeply depressed rather than drill into the Marcellus shale and, Cuomo proclaims, risk ground water contamination. This is, of course, nonsense. Fracking began in 1947 and hundreds of thousands of wells have been drilled in the last 67 years using the technique. There has not been a single case of documented ground water contamination from any of those wells.
Domestically, President Obama has, at best, slow walked the best and most obvious means of increasing American economic prosperity and employment. Internationally, he has worked to limit his country’s influence and prestige. I can think of no other example in all human history of a head of state whose policies were designed to weaken the country he headed.
