“With only 2% of the world’s oil reserves, we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices,” President Barack Obama said in his weekly address March 10. “Not when we consume 20% of the world’s oil.”

The claim is, if not blatantly false, at best grossly misleading. If the President didn’t know this, some advisors should be dismissed. If he did, he needs to accept the blame and formally correct it.

As Investors Business Daily explained,

… the figure Obama uses—proved oil reserves—vastly undercounts how much oil the U.S. actually contains. In fact, far from being oil-poor, the country is awash in vast quantities—enough to meet all the country’s oil needs for hundreds of years.

The U.S. has 22.3 billion barrels of proved reserves, a little less than 2% of the entire world’s proved reserves, according to the Energy Information Administration.

President Obama’s February 23 speech at the University of Miami supplemented his energy views in the State of the Union address and his 2013 Fiscal Year budget submitted to Congress. Playing defense in the face of high gasoline prices and an oil and gas boom not of his making, Obama’s pitch was long on misdirection and spin and short of true market-base reform.

Make no mistake: the President’s energy universe centers around curtailing the use of fossil fuels, in particular coal, due to fears that carbon dioxide (CO2) produced from combustion will cause catastrophic global warming.  This motivation will guide future energy policies until the Obama era is over.

The United States has the most abundant fossil fuel reserves in the world, the greatest agriculture system, and the most innovative population, all of which should ensure prosperity for centuries. …

“[Julian] Simon found that humanity progressed not only by solving immediate problems within the existing institutional framework but also by creatively improving the framework over time. . . . In the short run, members of society adopt localized technical and contractual fixes. In the medium range, they may explore government regulatory policies. In the longer term, they expand the scope and scale of the liberal institutions. These institutions of economic freedom—private property, binding contracts, and the rule of law—improve incentive structures that foster both economic well-being and environmental stewardship.”

– Fred Smith, “Introduction,” in Robert Bradley, Julian Simon and the Triumph of Energy Sustainability (Washington, D.C.: ALEC, 2000), p. 12.

Julian Simon (1932–98) would have been eighty years old today. MasterResource is inspired by his contributions to energy (what he labeled “the master resource”), as well as his open-ended view of human ingenuity (what he called “the ultimate resource”).…

Yesterday, I fawningly reviewed Robert Bradley’s Political Capitalism Project for providing information and insight to where much of our economy has gone wrong in the last 80 years, i.e., allowing companies to succeed by using political muscle instead of free market acumen.

The Bradley Project provides a sturdy worldview for thinking about energy policy. Today, I will critique both recent and historical energy policy by relying on Bradley’s framework for assessing the implications of political versus market capitalism. Tomorrow I will argue the legitimate role of government in energy markets and give an example where active government policy is needed.

Back to 1973

The modern era of energy policy began on October 17, 1973, the day that OPEC announced an oil embargo against the U.S. With very few exceptions, since that day, energy policy, on both sides of political aisle, deteriorated until finally, and literally, it fell off a cliff with the Obama Administration’s embrace of the “green economy” and its hostility to carbon energy.…