Energy Security: Last week, the U.S. exported more oil than we imported, for the first time in 70-plus years. And it happened not because of decades of federal "energy policies," but despite them.
XSince Richard Nixon was in the White House, presidents have pushed national energy plans that, they said, would reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil. These plans all had one thing in common — they all assumed that increased domestic oil production couldn't solve the problem.
Instead, from Nixon on down, Republican and Democratic presidents declared that the only way to achieve energy independence was through some combination of strict conservation measures and "alternative" forms of energy.
Energy Independence Promises
In 1973, for example, Nixon declared that "the answer to our long-term needs lies in developing new forms of energy." He promised to spend $10 billion researching it. That year, Nixon also announced "a conservation drive" that he said would cut personal energy consumption by 5%. And he proposed creating a new Department of Energy.
A few years later, Jimmy Carter signed the Energy Security Act of 1980, which created the disastrous Synthetic Fuel Corporation, calling it "the cornerstone of U.S. energy policy." He imposed fuel economy mandates on cars. And he urged people to turn down their thermostats in the winter.
Bill Clinton proposed creating "energy independent areas" that relied on renewables, efficiency, and homegrown energy. He claimed these would "prove to the rest of the world that energy independence built on clean energy can occur."
George W. Bush said in 2006 that "America is addicted to oil." The next year he signed the "Energy Independence and Security Act," which imposed tougher fuel-efficiency standards on vehicles, mandated ethanol use in gasoline, and imposed various new conservation mandates.
Barack Obama continued to advocate these well-trod prescriptions, while repeatedly insisting that America could not "drill our way" to independence.
None of it worked. Except for a brief respite in the early 1980s (when Ronald Reagan decontrolled oil prices) oil imports steadily increased.
A Radical Change
Then President Donald Trump took office and announced a radical departure from 50 years of received energy "wisdom." In a speech to the Energy Department months after taking office, he said that for decades leaders peddled the myth of energy scarcity. Most of it is self-imposed, he said. What the country needs, he said, isn't "alternative" energy, or new austerity measures. It's a government that "promotes energy development." Trump listed actions he was taking to lift federal impediments to energy production.
Lo and behold, Trump was right.
Advanced drilling technologies have opened vast expanses of domestic oil and natural gas. And as domestic production skyrocketed, imports have been steadily dropping.
Trump doesn't deserve the credit for this boom. Oil companies do. But unlike his predecessors, Trump understands that energy independence doesn't require yet another "energy plan" that tells people to wear more sweaters in the winter and wastes money on "new" energy sources.
It just requires government to get out of the way so that oil companies can get at the vast supplies of good old oil and gas right under U.S. soil.
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