Once again our friends at the Institute for Energy Research have issued the best smack down of Obama’s amazing energy claims. Read the link for the whole text, which isn’t long, but their three charts reprinted below tell the story: oil and gas production are indeed increasing, but on private land, and falling on federal land. Obama has nothing to do with the increase in oil and gas exploration. And as the third chart, which John posted here once before, shows, leasing activity in federal land has slowed to a crawl. That’s not all Obama’s fault, though. Environmental groups now litigate to halt or delay virtually every federal lease that comes up for bid. If Obama were serious about getting rid of counter-productive regulation, he’d support statutory changes that make these kind of purely obstructionist lawsuits harder to file.
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