What a difference one president makes.

To say that President Obama was against fossil fuels would be an understatement. By contrast, President Trump is “all in” on encouraging fossil fuel production. So what has been happening with the “Trump approach?”

Wasn’t it just a few years ago, Barack Obama mellifluously intoned that we “consume 20 percent of the world’s oil, (but) we only have 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves.” So, I think it’s fair to say that the results below show that he was off by… well, a lot – a whole lot!

[Source: Goodbye, OPEC, by Stephen Moore]

The results are spectacular:

• The Energy Information Administration reports that the U.S. could surpass Saudi Arabia in oil and gas by the end of the year.
• We are scheduled to be “numero uno” in the world before the end of the decade. (Russia is currently No. 1 in the world.)
• In 1974, Hubbert predicted that peak oil would occur in 1995 “if current trends continue.” So, as usual, the doomsayers were wrong. (M. King Hubbert, Energy Resources (National Academy of Sciences)
• U.S. oil “now floods Europe at the expense of OPEC and Russia,” as reported by Reuters (I won’t be losing any sleep about Russia or Saudi Arabia).
• America is now selling more than a half-million barrels a day (the export ban ended).
• This would reduce our trade deficit by more than $200 billion a year.
• OPEC can no longer hold the world hostage, as they did in the 1970s.
• Republicans plan to use the royalties and lease payments from drilling on federal lands to reduce the trillion-dollar annual budget deficit. (This is essentially free money to Uncle Sam, and by some estimates these payments could exceed $1 trillion over the next decade.)

Last week Reuters argued that the American shale boom should be called “Donald Trump’s Revenge.” Trump promised to “make America energy dominant.” He has only been in office a little more than a year and we are well on our way.

Roy Filly