In his weekly radio address, President Obama more or less took credit for America's dramatic shift to becoming the world's largest energy producer, even as American carbon emissions dropped. But the headline provided by Investor's Business Dailywas more accurate: "Obama: Domestic oil production surges despite my best efforts."
In fact, the federal government has limited drilling on federal land, and taken other steps to make oil production in America harder. But as Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman reports in his new book, The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters, the changes—horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking"—were brought about by a bunch of outsiders working on their own, without help from either the feds or from Big Oil….
"[W]ildcatters" were able to do something that the federal government, despite programs ranging from synfuels to Solyndra, wasn't: They produced cheap energy and a big step toward energy independence.
Thanks to the fracking revolution, the air is cleaner, gas is cheaper, and petro-state dictatorships have less geopolitical influence. But this happened not as a result of some big-government program, but as the result of individuals staking their lives and fortunes on a risky venture, one that, as Zuckerman notes, made some rich but left others near bankruptcy.
