It is remarkable hearing the man who once said with a straight face “You didn’t build that” take credit for one achievement after another that happened after his presidency and, in some cases, in spite of his efforts to the contrary.
This happened again Tuesday when Obama was called upon to deliver remarks at the 25th anniversary gala of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
Fittingly for a man with so massive an ego, the former president was seated in a chair that was many sizes too big for him when he claimed credit for making America world’s largest oil producer. You can hear his foolish boast beginning at 47:24 in the video that follows.
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https://youtu.be/05Ds1dYzCjI
Not only didn’t Obama have a role in making the U.S. the world’s number one producer of oil, which officially happened in September of 2018, but he spent most of his presidency talking down fossil fuels and injecting pie-in-the-sky dreams of converting the nation’s energy grid to a system driven by wind power. Here is another video, this one shot in New Hampshire on March 1, 2012. Obama was campaigning for re-election when he announced that “we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices,” adding:
There are no quick fixes or silver bullets. If somebody tells you there are, they’re not telling you the truth. If we’re going to take control of our energy future … if we’re going to avoid high gas prices every single year … then we’ve got to have an all-of-the-above strategy that develops every single source of American energy [sic]. Not just oil and gas but also wind and solar and biofuels. …
As LU contributor Hans Bader recently noted, “legislation requiring the use of biofuels … has resulted in the destruction of vast areas of tropical rainforest, massively increasing greenhouse gas emissions.”
Gas prices meanwhile continue to drop despite Obama’s grim prediction that they are going to remain “high … every single year.”
