ON DOMESTIC OIL

“[W]e constantly hear we can’t drill our way to lower gas prices, but how does anybody know when we haven’t even tried? Despite enormous improvements in extraction technology, the amount of oil produced domestically in America went down in the last eight years. It went down in the 1990s. It went down in the 1980s. In fact, it’s been trending down since the 1970s, back when Barack Obama’s ‘new’ ideas seemed fresh coming from Jimmy Carter. Today, we produce about as much domestic oil as we did in the late 1940s, even though we keep finding, but not utilizing, more proven reserves. That hardly sounds like a country that’s been dedicated to ‘drilling our way’ to anything.”

—Jonah Goldberg