Fueling Freedom

Several years ago Steve Moore attended a climate change conference in Aspen, Colorado. Do-gooder millionaire and billionaire environmentalists, arriving in their private jets, were whisked from the airport in stretch limousines to the four-star hotel, where ostentatious display of wealth was the order of the day.

Apparently billionaires are allowed to leave gigantic carbon footprints as they pontificate about the evils of global warming. When challenged, these greens of great wealth craft excuses about how their lifestyles are “carbon neutral” thanks to purchasing carbon offsets. They sound like the scions of wealthy families who avoided the Civil War draft by paying a poor man to fight in their place.

When it comes to climate change, the greens are a “do as I say and not do as I do” movement. Reducing energy use and living with less—that’s the sacrifice that the masses must make to save the planet, but not the elites. The climate change lobby favors policies that severely disrupt other people’s lives, mostly the poor and politically weak, not their own.

Contrast this green elitism with the reality that nearly one billion people on the planet lack access to reliable electricity. It’s astonishing that in the second decade of the twenty-first century electric power is still unavailable to about one-seventh of the world’s population. Many of those living in energy poverty reside in Africa. Since electricity is the ignition switch to higher living standards, making energy more accessible and affordable is arguably the most important and achievable way to alleviate global poverty. Of course increasing food production, fighting disease, and improving access to education are also precursors to eliminating economic deprivation, but those are dependent on cheap energy as well.

To fully appreciate this dependence on electric power, consider what happens here at home when a young person can’t find an outlet to recharge his iPhone or laptop computer or Gameboy. I’ve seen frantic teenagers nearly have a nervous breakdown if their cell phones die and they can’t instantly recharge them.

South Korea has universal electricity, and its cities and even its remote towns are lighted up like a Christmas tree at night. North Korea, where children and families suffer severe malnutrition and even starvation, and where lives are dreary and short, is dark at night, except for the cities where the wealthy political class live. It is a near certainty that the North Koreans are not worried about the temperature of the planet in 2100.

Electricity use is highly correlated with growth. Wealthy countries like the United States use a lot of electricity. Countries that are desperately poor use almost none. Which way does the causality run? Wealth causes energy use, to be sure. But energy use also builds wealth. These are self-reinforcing and circular relationships.

Let us take, for example, internet access and “broadband” development. As Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois put it during a congressional hearing in 2007,

[B]roadband access is not a luxury item but a necessity to compete in the twenty-first century. Quite simply, businesses, hospitals, schools, and even communities, regions, and states are better able to compete if they have access to or can offer broadband service.

The statistics in this area are compelling. A 2006 report by the U.S. Department of Commerce shows that broadband access enhances the economic growth and performance of communities. Over the three year study, broadband communities significantly outgrew non-broadband communities in terms of employment, the number of businesses overall, businesses in IT-intensive sectors, and property values. . . .

[M]any of our residents living in rural areas do not have access to high speed internet service. The digital divide remains a reality. We all want to jump onto the Information Superhighway, yet there is no on-ramp in many parts of the country.¹

This all sounds right on the mark. But broadband depends on electric power. Making energy more expensive in rural and poor areas will reduce their access to broadband. The digital divide will widen.

Now consider the 2015 Paris climate agreement’s effect on energy usage and wealth. Paul Driessen, an energy expert at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, has run the numbers, and they are frightening to be sure. Writing about the United States, he warns:

The impacts would be far worse than many news stories and White House press releases suggest. Those sources often say the proposed climate treaty and other actions seek GHG reductions of 80% below predicted 2050 emission levels. The real original Paris treaty target is 80% below actual 1990 levels.

That means the world would have to eliminate 96% of the greenhouse gases that all humanity would likely release if we reach world population levels, economic growth and living standards predicted for 2050. The United States would likely have to slash its CO2 and GHG reductions to zero.

Moreover, current 2050 forecasts already assume and incorporate significant energy efficiency, de-carbonization and de-industrialization over the next 35 years. They are not business-as-usual numbers or extrapolations of past trends. Further CO2 reductions beyond those already incorporated into the forecasts would thus be increasingly difficult, expensive, and indeed impossible to achieve.

Slashing fossil energy use that far would thus require decimating economic growth, job creation and preservation, and average per-person incomes. In fact, average world per capita GDP would plummet from a projected $30,600 in 2050 to a miserable $1,200 per year.

Average per capita GDP in 2050 would be less than what Americans had in 1830! Many futuristic technologies would still exist, but only wealthy families and ruling elites could afford them.²

That is the effect on the United States, which is already rich. Within the United States, the climate change deal will increase inequality and make our economy less productive.

But the wealth divide between countries is also going to widen even more. For poor countries, which should be using more, not less, fossil fuel to power their twenty-first-century economic progress, mandatory energy reduction targets spells a cruel regression. But won’t “green energy” replace fossil fuels to produce electric power for poor countries? As we’ve seen, medieval energy sources like windmills can’t come close to doing that.

A theme of this book has been that the war against fossil fuels threatens to pull off one of the greatest wealth transfers from the poor to the rich in history. No matter what reparations the rich nations pay to the poor ones—the Third World says it wants $100 billion of bribe money from the Western nations to dance to their climate change tune—it will never compensate for the damage done by higher energy costs.

America’s Growth Deficit

Energy is clearly linked to growth, but why is growth so important? Some on the Left argue that “growth mania” is despoiling the planet and that we all should learn to live in harmony with nature, consuming less of everything. The anti-fossil-fuels crusade in America and around the globe is inspired in part by a philosophical and theological revolt against the pursuit of growth and development. They want a “steady state,” not a growth state.

Yet nearly every economic problem that America faces—poverty, the national debt, stagnant middle-class incomes, state and local pension liabilities, an over-stretched military that can’t protect us, crumbling infrastructure—can be alleviated through faster economic growth. The economy of the Obama decade has grown at less than 2 percent per year. We should and could be growing at more than twice that pace.

America’s growth gap is widening. In the post–Great Recession recovery, the economy has had its worst performance on jobs and incomes and GDP growth of any post-recession period since the 1930s. In constant 2009 dollars, we are $1.7 trillion behind where we should be and more than $2.5 trillion behind the pace of growth under the Reagan expansion.³ The jobs deficit is even more alarming to many Americans. We are about five million jobs shy of where we should be with faster growth. That deficit is the equivalent of every worker in Michigan losing his job.

America’s Energy Abundance

What does any of this have to do with energy? Everything. A pro-growth energy policy is the springboard to rapid growth in economic output and enhancing our competitiveness in global markets. America should pursue a number of measures to enhance economic growth, including a cut in the corporate income tax rate, a flat-rate income tax, regulatory reform, repealing and replacing Obamacare, and free trade. But few policy changes would revive the U.S. economy as quickly and powerfully as a pro-development energy policy.

The United States is strategically positioned to become not merely energy independent by 2020 but the dominant energy force on the planet, a development that would have profound economic implications. We spend roughly $150 billion a year importing about 9.2 million barrels of oil a day⁴, or nearly half (48%) of all petroleum and crude products consumed. Just over one-third of these imports come from OPEC, with major consequences for our national interest and security.⁵ Of course, Russia is also a beneficiary of our excess demand for oil—meaning that we indirectly fund Russian aggression across the Baltic.⁶ We now have an opportunity to erase the gap between our need for oil and our ability to produce it ourselves.

And then, of course, there is the energy component of the war against the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations. One of our most effective economic weapons is America’s vast shale oil and gas reserves and our five-hundred-year supply of coal. Every barrel of oil we produce here at home is one less barrel we have to purchase from abroad. We know from intelligence reports that the Islamic State receives as much as half a billion dollars a year from oil. As the U.S. drills for more cheap natural gas, we can export it to Europe and liberate our allies from dependence on Russia for energy. The good news is that there is no economic or geological reason why the United States must ever buy another gallon of oil from those who are trying to kill us. We now have the capacity to achieve real energy independence within five years by pursuing a pro-America energy development strategy.

To achieve this goal, America and most of the rest of the world will rely on fossil fuels for their energy needs for the foreseeable future. Contrary to wild-eyed Malthusian claims to the contrary, oil, natural gas, and coal are abundant in the United States. Figure 11.1 shows how many years’ worth we have of each.⁷ The shale revolution completely discredits the frightening tales of America running out of oil and gas. We have more fossil fuels than any other nation.

For decades, the Malthusians have controlled our national energy policy. In March 2012, President Obama moaned, “America uses 20 percent of the world’s oil, and we’ve got 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves. I wasn’t a math major, but if you’re using 20, you’ve only got 2, that means you have got to bring in the rest from someplace else.”⁸ That is complete nonsense. As we have shown, America’s reserves of resources are growing every day. In fact, our reserves are at least three times higher than Mr. Obama thought when he made that comment. The Institute for Energy Research points out that America has drilled billions of barrels of domestic oil over the past forty years, but our reserves are much higher today than they were before we started all the drilling. Technology is outpacing depletion. In the mid-2020s, we will have larger recoverable reserves than we have today.

FIGURE 11.1

Total Recoverable Resources in U.S.

Source: Institute for Energy Research, North American Energy Inventory (December 2011)

Consider what has happened in less than a decade with oil production. In 2008 the United States produced about five million barrels a day.⁹ We hit 8.7 million in 2014¹⁰ and are predicted to hit 10.3 million by 2025. What a refutation of the skeptics who thought America’s oil resources were running dry. We are drowning in cheap oil.

No, President Obama, we are not going to run out of oil—at least not any time in the next century. The supply is virtually unlimited. Don’t be surprised if in the future we see continued declines in energy costs, the opposite of the trend that was predicted by the limits-to-growth crowd.

The environmental Left’s vision for our energy future—the pursuit of an artificial, self-imposed reliance on renewable energy—is entirely wrong. Progressives used to promise a “chicken in every pot and a car in every garage;” now it’s a solar panel on every roof and a windmill in every back yard.

There are many problems with this energy strategy. First, in spite of all the subsidies, solar and wind power account for only about 2.5 percent of our energy production today.¹¹ And even the Energy Information Agency says that the combined marketable and nonmarketable wind and solar energy consumed will account for just 3 percent of all energy consumed in the United States by 2030.¹² The main reason that green energy dreams are quickly fading is that shale oil and gas are crushing so many of the alternative energy sources. The recent drop in oil prices is another nail in the coffin for trendy alternatives. The booming energy source in America and the world isn’t solar or wind power, it is natural gas. In Asia, coal has taken off.

A second problem with renewable energy is its exorbitant cost to consumers and taxpayers. We already layer on tens of billions of dollars of subsidies to enhance wind and solar power. The effective per kilowatt subsidy to wind was more than 50 times that of fossil fuels in 2013; and the same average subsidy to solar power was a whopping 345 times the average per unit subsidy conventional fossil fuels.¹³ These sources impose enormous costs on American taxpayers and consumers. If weren’t conveniently hidden from view, there would be a consumer revolt.

Finally, the global war on fossil fuels is a war against progress, prosperity, and the poor. Reliance on inefficient renewable energy will hit the poor hardest, denying opportunity and enhanced living standards to those who need them most. Carbon taxes, cap and trade schemes, regulatory impediments to drilling, and renewable energy standards are all regressive taxes. The policies of “environmental justice” promoted by the Left are robbing the poor, who spend a much larger share of their income on energy than do the rich. The basics of modern human existence—driving our cars, lighting and heating our homes, and producing everything from cereal to televisions to tennis shoes—are all affected by these price hikes.

On the other hand, if the billionaire hedge fund manager and green energy promoter Tom Steyer’s utility bill rises by 30 percent, or if he has to pay $5 a gallon for gasoline, he doesn’t notice. But for a family living on $30,000 a year, it means keeping the thermostat at sixty-eight degrees in the dead of winter or not buying school supplies.

A 2014 Pew Research Center poll found that only two major voting groups opposed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline: Democrats who make more than $100,000 annually and Democrats with college or advanced degrees—i.e., the elites. They don’t need cheap energy and they don’t need the jobs.¹⁴

The chief victims of the war against fossil fuels are the poorest citizens of the poorest nations. Developing countries need cheap energy. Commanding poor countries on the cusp of development to meet “renewable” energy standards, which are not merely inconvenient but prohibitively expensive, defies universal standards of morality. In addition to stunting economic growth, these artificially imposed energy constraints impede the ability of poor nations to enjoy lengthen life expectancy, reduce child death rates, and eradicate disease. Just ask Somalia, Uganda, and Nepal how their ultra-low per capita carbon dioxide emissions are working out for them.¹⁵

It doesn’t have to be this way. The alternative future that we envision for America enhances our security and remains true to our moral values. It makes economic and fiscal sense. It is the way out of our malaise.

A Pro-Growth Energy Strategy

Now let’s look at what we could expect if the United States embarked on a pro-energy development economic crusade.

The consultants at IHS have estimated that the 2015 repeal of the 1970s-era ban on exporting American oil over time will provide a $135 billion-a-year boost to energy output in the United States.¹⁶ That means hundreds of thousands more jobs, higher wages, and tens of billions of dollars in additional tax revenues. The average worker in the oil industry earns between $75,000 and $100,000 a year. These are good, often union, jobs.

But that is just step one toward a rational energy policy. If we were to move from an energy-importing nation to an energy-exporting nation, we could nearly double our economic growth rate. Instead of growing at 2 percent we could achieve well over 4 percent growth. As we tap into the full potential of our shale oil and gas, we can become the number-one export nation on the planet. This could easily mean more than $1 trillion a year in oil, gas, and coal exports each year—perhaps exceeding 5 percent of GDP.

The United State government is the most indebted institution in the world—actually in the history of the world. Our debt is now more than $18.5 trillion, and in some recent years we’ve added more than $1 trillion to that debt. Neither party has a strategy for balancing the budget, let alone reducing the existing debt burden.

How Much Oil Do We Have?

The key to doing so is drilling on public lands. At today’s prices, we are sitting on nearly $50 trillion of assets. It is the world’s greatest treasure chest. Obama has been determined to keep it in the ground, and his climate change policies make sure drilling doesn’t happen.

So far at least 90% of the shale gas and shale oil revolution has happened on private land. But around half of all the land west of the Mississippi is government-owned. How big could the shale boom be if we opened up public land for drilling? It’s an exciting question. And the answer is really, really big.

A comprehensive survey by the Congressional Research Service in 2010 documented that the United States has the largest endowment of total recoverable proved reserves of hydrocarbon resources in the world.¹⁷ No other country has more of this recoverable oil and natural gas than we do. We have more than Russia, twice as much as China, three times more than Saudi Arabia, and twenty-three times more than Brazil. The United States is also the world’s leader in technically recoverable but undiscovered oil and natural gas, with 50 percent more than Saudi Arabia, more than four times that of Brazil, and twelve times that of China.¹⁸ Since then we have discovered even more oil and gas, and what is technologically recoverable keeps growing as the fracking and other drilling technologies improve and get cheaper. We’ve just scratched the surface—literally and figuratively—of our energy resources in America. The more we use, the more we find.

A 2011 report by the non-profit, non-partisan Institute for Energy Research, “North American Energy Inventory,” concludes that the United States sits atop 1.442 trillion barrels of recoverable oil, 2,744 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas, and 486 billion short tons of recoverable coal.¹⁹

Offshore oil and gas reserves are also extremely large but unfortunately largely unavailable for production. At the time of the last Department of the Interior Offshore Oil and Gas National Assessment in 2011, just over seventeen billion barrels of oil had been produced from the federal offshore,²⁰ and more than twenty billion barrels of already discovered oil reserves were available for production.²¹ Further, the assessment estimated that exploration and production activities in the federal offshore would, in the mean case, eventually produce an additional ninety billion barrels of currently undiscovered and technically recoverable oil²²—assuming the offshore lands containing this oil are reasonably made available for leasing and production.

Similarly, the National Assessment estimated that just over 173 trillion cubic feet of natural gas have been produced from the federal offshore, and that more than seventy-two trillion cubic feet of already discovered natural gas is available to be produced.²³ Further, the National Assessment estimated that exploration and production activities in the federal offshore would, in the mean case, eventually produce an additional 405 trillion cubic feet of currently undiscovered and technically recoverable natural gas—assuming the offshore lands containing the natural gas are reasonably made available for leasing and production.²⁴ These two figures combine to an expected potential future production from the federal offshore of 477 trillion cubic feet of conventional natural gas.

So what’s the problem?

Contrary to their experiences on state and private lands, our oil and gas producers have been severely hampered in their exploration and production efforts on federal lands because the Obama administration has become increasingly bureaucratic and restrictive. Permitting a well with state regulators might take a few days to a month. The same well on federal lands may take a year or longer. Jack Coleman, formerly an energy expert at the U.S. Department of the Interior, testified to the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power, “A litany of actions by the Department of the Interior have unreasonably, and frequently unlawfully, restricted energy leasing, exploration and production on federal lands, both onshore and offshore.”²⁵

Consider the many federal restrictions on drilling listed by Mr. Coleman in his testimony:

• Removal of the Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Eastern Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska Beaufort Sea from consideration for oil and gas leasing until 2017 at the earliest.

• A decision to send commercial oil shale regulations back through the rulemaking process despite the fact that these regulations were finalized after months of extensive and open public comment, including the reports and recommendations of an 11-member statutorily-mandated task force made up of federal, state and local officials. A failure to move forward with energy projects in Alaska, both onshore and offshore, that exposes the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System to risk of shutdown.

• Placing of severely restrictive and expensive conditions of approval on permits—long after the lessee has made major investments in the lease.

• Failure to properly and expeditiously implement many of the energy law reforms enacted by Congress as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, including the NEPA categorical exclusions provision and the oil shale and tar sands commercial leasing program.

• Continued failure to comply with statutory permitting deadlines for exploration plans in the outer Continental Shelf.

These restrictions, alone with our current energy and environmental policies, will keep most of our energy resources from being exploited. As Mr. Coleman put it, “Our national energy resources located on federal onshore and offshore lands are locked up in a deep freezer, with many padlocks on it. Each new unnecessary regulatory restraint is a new padlock on that freezer—keeping energy prices high.”

So how do we reverse course? The Set America Free Act of 2005²⁶ established a national policy of ensuring that Canada, Mexico, and the United States are energy self-sufficient by 2025. For a host of economic and national security reasons, this goal of energy self-sufficiency is prudent. Some of the findings of the House of Representatives reveal the staggering scope of the potential resources of the countries of North America, and so we quote from the report at some length:²⁷

• North American countries have the resource base and technical ability to increase production of oil by at least 15 Mmbbl/d by 2025 and 20 Mmbbl/d by 2030 even before increases in coal liquifaction, biofuels, gas-to-liquids, and other methods of creating liquid substitutes for crude oil and crude oil products.

• The United States oil shale resource base (2 trillion barrels of oil in place out of 2.6 trillion in the world) [is] believed to be capable of eventually producing 10 Mmbbl/d for more than 100 years.

• The Canadian Alberta oil sands resource base (1.7 trillion barrels of oil in place), [could] eventually produc[e] 10 Mmbbl/d for more than 100 years.

• [We have] 60 billion barrels [of oil] potentially producible with advanced CO2 enhanced oil recovery technology.

• The United States oil sands resource base [has] 54 billion barrels of oil in place.

• The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Coastal Plain area (ANWR) [has] a mean technically recoverable resource of more than 10 billion barrels of oil.

• The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A) [has] a mean technically recoverable resource of 9.3 billion barrels of oil.

• The 12–18 billion barrels of oil [could] be producible in the Canadian Atlantic offshore.

The House Report concludes:

Economists have found that while OPEC is an important source of oil price increases, the United States government is also partly to blame because overly burdensome government regulations on domestic energy exploration, production, and sales have supported OPEC’s monopoly power and restricted competition from American energy companies, in addition to making expansive highly prospective areas off-limits to leasing and production.

Our $50 Trillion Treasure Chest

What do these giant oil and gas resources potentially mean for the United States? They mean 4 percent economic growth or more. Millions of new jobs are possible. Wages will rise. We simply need to declare a national commitment to American energy independence. These energy resources are wholly owned by the American people.

Achieving American energy self-sufficiency will generate enough money in royalties and corporate income taxes to pay off much of the national debt without any other tax revenues. But these vast resources will never pay off any of the national debt if they are not made available for leasing, drilling, and production.

According to an analysis by Coleman, all of the oil and gas resources under federal lands and offshore that could be recovered with existing technologies amount to at least $1.5-trillion-worth of barrels over the next twenty years. At the current price of $35 a barrel, this would increase GDP by $50 trillion over two decades.

Ladies and gentlemen: America has won the lottery. We have hit the jackpot. We have found a $50-trillion treasure lying under our feet. The income tax and royalty payments to the federal government would be $3–4 trillion over twenty years.

Such revenues would radically improve our grim fiscal situation, which now includes tens of trillions of dollars of deficits and unfunded liabilities in the decades to come. To try to raise the money to pay these bills by hiking taxes would require crippling tax rates of 50, 60, or even 70 percent.

The story gets even better, because the numbers cited above are highly conservative; they may vastly underestimate how much the government and taxpayers could profit from our energy resources. They “do not include natural gas hydrates which we should be able to commercially produced in the near future. More than 99% of America’s 300,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas hydrates are located in the deepwater federal offshore.” Coleman estimates that

if even only 1% of this resource is eventually producible, it would add 3,200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Production of this 1%, or 3,200 trillion cubic feet, of our natural gas hydrate resources would generate approximately $3 trillion in royalties and about $4.5 trillion in corporate income tax on this production from the lessees, for a total of approximately $7.5 trillion.²⁸

Finally, these numbers don’t include the eight hundred billion barrels of western oil shale. An estimated 70 percent of this or more than half a trillion barrels are estimated to be producible from high density deposits of oil shale on federal lands. Federal royalties on this production are estimated to total $3.214 trillion, with federal corporate income taxes totaling $7.546 trillion, for total federal revenues of $10.76 trillion from production of federal high-density oil shale deposits.

So now we arrive at an upper-bound estimate for the value to the government of our fossil fuel oil and gas resources. Totaling all of the production from onshore and offshore federal lands comes to at least $10 trillion and as much as $20 trillion, which is more than our national debt.

Even if the world eases away from fossil fuels over the decades to come, as the EIA recently reiterated, the United States and the world will rely on oil, natural gas, and coal for the vast majority of their energy resources for at least the next twenty years. This means that the American people still have enough time to reap the vast bounty of fossil fuels that God has bestowed up us, if we get started now.

What to Do with All That Money: A Proposal

So what should be done with the bounty from all this drilling? Here is what we propose.

The revenues should be shared for high-priority public purposes. For every dollar raised in oil revenues, twenty cents should go to the state from which the resource was produced. Another forty cents should pay off our national debt. Another twenty cents should go to pay for a tax reform package. And the final twenty cents should go to repair and modernize America’s infrastructure, including the building of vital pipelines.

We call this a win-win-win-win-win proposal. This could be the most extraordinary public-private partnership in American history and the most transformative act of government since the Louisiana Purchase. It is certainly on the magnitude of the Apollo project that landed a man on the moon.

The upside from producing American energy—both from an economic and national security standpoint—is almost incalculable. Yet the American people have not seen a results-oriented national energy program designed to achieve American energy self-sufficiency, and then large volumes to export to the world.

Voters understand that the United States has abundant oil, gas, and coal resources, and they do not believe that their government is doing all that it can to produce the energy necessary to power the country and provide for our energy, economic, and national security. Imagine the folly if Saudi Arabia had decided not to drill for its resources forty years ago.

Energy is the lifeblood of a nation’s economy. If energy is abundant and reasonably priced, the economy will prosper. Some interests have created an illusion that somehow energy will just appear whenever we want it. As Confucius is reputed to have said, “If a man takes no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand.” Energy sources take many years to develop—they cannot be “turned on” like a light switch. For decades, our government has ignored the challenge of developing energy supplies for the future.

Like every other nation, we should be developing our own oil and natural gas resources. This is a simple matter of economics. Would we rather have the hundreds of thousands of new high-paying oil and gas production jobs in the United States, where the investment will turn over in our economy and build it on a broad base, or would we rather send the production investment and oil purchase dollars to other countries to build the economy and create jobs there? There’s nothing wrong with purchasing and importing foreign oil, but there’s a big problem when we’re forced to do so because we’re prevented from producing our own.

So what are the steps necessary to create this prosperous and energy rich future for America? The first was taken, finally, at the end of 2015, which is to allow the exporting of American oil and natural gas. Here are the others:

1. Allow drilling on federal lands. More than 90 percent of all drilling during the Obama years has been on private lands.

2. Build a national network of pipelines across the country.

3. Allow the building of refineries and LNG terminals in the United States. It has been almost forty years since a major new refinery opened in the United States, even though the population has nearly doubled since the mid-1970s and our energy production has doubled as well.²⁹ Environmental laws that make refineries in the prohibitively expensive, if they can be built at all, are mostly to blame. LNG terminals are necessary for exporting our natural gas.

4. Rein in the out-of-control EPA. The agency has an agenda to put the coal industry out of business and to destroy the natural gas and oil industries, and it is succeeding. Environmental rules have to be shown to be cost-effective, meaning that the cost to the economy of complying with the rules is justified on the basis of the environmental benefits—and measured honestly. Few if any of Obama’s anti-fossil-fuels regulations come close to meeting this test.

5. Build nuclear power plants and allow twenty-first-century micro-nuclear reactors to be used for energy production.

6. End renewable energy standards in the states and at the federal level. The Manhattan Institute has documented that these standards add to the cost of electricity production, gouging consumers and discouraging fossil fuel development.³⁰

7. End all subsidies for all forms of energy. The Left complains about taxpayer subsidies for oil and gas. To the extent they exist they should be ended. But the cost of wind and solar energy grants, loans, loan guarantees, and so on is in the tens of billions of dollars. The effective per kilowatt subsidy to wind was more than fifty times that of fossil fuels in 2013, and the same average subsidy to solar power was a whopping 345 times the average per unit subsidy conventional fossil fuels.³¹

8. Shut down the U.S. Department of Energy and let the free market work.

If we get this right, America will get rich, and we—not Saudi Arabia or Russia or OPEC—will be the future energy capital of the world.