A muffled boom
A junior White House economist made a chart last year — the sort of chart that previous presidents might have put in a campaign ad. It shows that U.S. energy production, from wind and solar to oil and gas, has boomed under President Biden. The nation is closer than ever to a goal that presidents have pursued for decades: true energy independence.
The Times has recreated the chart, using the same data:
The Biden administration has never published that chart. The president isn’t bragging about record oil and gas production.
His reluctance highlights a political problem for him and other Democrats. Biden wants to phase out oil and gas eventually to fight global warming. But domestic oil and gas production is expanding on his watch. That brings political benefits: It helps reduce energy costs, and polls show Americans largely support it. But more drilling also means more pollution — and more fury from young progressive voters.
“It is a tough balancing act,” said Ryan Cummings, the economist who created the energy chart. “You want to reduce emissions, but you need a bridge to get there.”
Frack, baby, frack
Republicans and fossil-fuel groups have accused Biden of waging “war” on American energy because he wants to halt America’s greenhouse gas emissions in a quarter century.
But no president has overseen energy production like Biden has. He loves to talk about part of that story: how the United States is
producing more power from renewables, including a surge in solar power accelerated by the climate law he signed in 2022.
It’s the other half of the story he shies away from: the increased production of oil and natural gas.
For decades, America’s oil wells seemed to be slowly drying up. The country’s daily oil production
fell by half from the early 1970s to the 2008 financial crisis. Oil
imports rose.
Hydraulic fracturing — fracking, a process that allows drillers to access oil and gas reserves that were previously too expensive to tap — changed that. Production rebounded. It reached record highs when Donald Trump was president. The United States was suddenly selling more oil than any other country and exporting more than it imported.
Under Biden’s watch, the U.S. broke that record
last fall. The country also set records for
natural gas output. In the first half of 2023, the United States was the world’s largest exporter of
liquefied natural gas.
Those developments have strengthened Biden’s hand in foreign policy: Europe has been able to replace much of the gas it once imported from Russia during the war in Ukraine. And oil prices have stayed relatively low, even as Saudi Arabia and other countries cut production to increase profits.
The political bind
But all that production has brought Biden grief from environmental groups, which successfully pushed America to join nearly 200 nations last year
in agreeing to phase out fossil fuels.
Climate activists are a key plank of Biden’s liberal base. So are young voters — and polls show that climate change is among the most important issues motivating them this year. Under pressure from those groups, Biden said last month that he would
pause approval of new natural-gas export terminals.
But other Democrats, including a new Democratic polling group called Blueprint, have pushed Biden to tout record drilling. They say it will help him attract independent voters — the sort of people past candidates wooed with promises of energy independence.
In one way, Biden has embraced the drilling boom: gasoline prices. He released oil from America’s strategic reserve around the invasion of Ukraine.
He has since boastedthat the move helped reduce gas prices that hit $5 a gallon in June 2022.
In private conversations, Biden and his team can be frank. They say that keeping oil and gas flowing in the short term can ease the path to a no-emission energy future by shielding working-class consumers from high prices that might turn them against climate policies.
Biden told me as much in 2021, when I asked at a news conference about the tension between his efforts to lower gas prices and emissions at the same time. He said it was important to keep gas prices down because they had a “profound impact” on working-class families.
“So,” he added, “I don’t see anything inconsistent with that.”
