A metal insect from one of the Godzilla movies.

Why does Obama hate oil so much? All he wants to do is stop drilling oil and make everyone use cars that run on positive energy and replace all plastics with material made out of free-range bacteria or something. This guy is just the worst president ever for energy development! It’s an outrage, I tell you, etc.!

U.S. oil production surged last week to the highest level since January 1997, reducing the country’s dependence on imported fuels as new technology unlocks crude trapped in shale formations.

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Crude output rose by 3.7 percent to 6.509 million barrels a day in the week ended Sept. 21, the Energy Department reported today. America met 83 percent of its energy needs in the first six months of the year, department data show. If the trend continues through 2012, it will be the highest level of self- sufficiency since 1991. Imports have declined 3.2 percent from the same period a year earlier.

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A combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has helped reduce America’s reliance on foreign oil. The same technology unleashed a boom in natural gas output from shale that pushed inventories to a record last year.

As John Adams said, facts are stubborn things. But, then, he was a Federalist, not a Republican.

We should also note that this boom in domestic production is probably why gas prices have gone down so much ha ha no, they haven’t.

Click to embiggen. (Image courtesy of GasBuddy.com.)

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Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a debate about energy production that’s based in reality? And by “energy production,” I of course mean, “everything in politics.”