US has gone from reliance on hostile energy providers to a dominant producer

Washington Examiner Editorial:

As recently as 2011, members of Congress were worried about America’s “increasing reliance on hostile countries for energy.” Now, there's a lesson in how quickly things change.

In less than a decade, the nation’s energy situation has been altered so dramatically as to be unrecognizable. Not long ago, America was in abject and needless dependency on foreign oil, importing 64 percent of what it consumed as recently as 2007. Today, the nation produces more than 76 percent of what it consumes. It leads the world in the production of petroleum liquids. Its oil exports have gone from zero to more than 2 million barrels a day in just a few years.

President Trump has taken measures recently to take advantage of our growing dominance in world energy production. His Interior Department is moving to allow offshore drilling in many regions previously off limits. He has also killed an Obama-era rule that would have imposed unjustifiable costs on people fracking for oil on federal lands.

Increased oil production will help low-income consumers and people looking for skilled jobs in the economy of the next two decades. It might also help calm turbulent regions of the world by reducing the flow of petrodollars to terrorists and cutting the power that hostile regimes have over life in this country.

It will modestly help America rectify trade imbalances, against which Trump rails. It will also reduce the federal deficit, as Uncle Sam collects the leases of oil drilled on public lands and the taxes paid by thousands of new hires in the oil industry.

Trump is not only right to get his administration out of the way of oil development, but is also doing it just at the right moment. We know that the U.S. and all other nations need oil and will for the foreseeable future. But it is also an unspoken inevitability that humans will not use oil forever in the amounts they use it today.
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This is an issue where Democrats are on the side of Russia and OPEC in trying to hinder US energy development.  That is the effect of their policies no matter what they say to justify their anti-energy left embrace.

The US should also increase its investment in energy infrastructure.  The anti-energy left has tried to stop pipelines that carry energy to consumers leaving many in dire straights in the Northeast when a winter storm hits like the recent one.