Like the rooster that takes credit for the sunrise, President Barack “You Didn’t Build That” Obama woke up the other day and decided to take credit for another thing he had nothing to do with. The president who said that companies like Solyndra were the hallmark of a future in which workers drove Chevy Volts, predicted that manufacturing jobs of the past could not be brought back, not only took credit for an economy he didn’t build, but also for the energy boom he opposed which is fueling it.

Back in 2012, geologist Barack Obama, poster child for the “peak oil” crowd,  told us that calling for increased production as Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin did. by increased drilling – "drill, baby, drill," she called it -- was not a plan, but rather "a bumper sticker."  Obama assured us, "You know, we can't just drill our way to lower gas prices,"

Well we have, just as those manufacturing jobs that weren’t coming back have come back. So now Obama would have us forget what he said about the fuels of  the past, as he massaged his ego one more time:

Former President Barack Obama on Tuesday took credit for booming U.S. oil and gas production, telling investors to "say thank you" to him.

Obama spoke in Houston at an event hosted by Rice University’s Baker Institute, where he praised his administration's commitment to the Paris climate agreement before taking credit for the United States being the biggest producer of oil and gas during his administration.

"I was extraordinarily proud of the Paris accords because -- you know, I know we’re in oil country and we need American energy, and by the way, American energy production," Obama said.

"You wouldn't always know it, but it went up every year I was president. That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas -- that was me, people."

Sorry, Barack, but the man who blocked the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines doesn’t get to take credit for the oil that soon will be running through both. Nor is the president who opposed two technologies developed by private industry, fracking and horizontal drilling, get to take credit for the abundance hey have produced,

Obama tried to kill off fracking with a rule designed to burden the oil industry with excessive reporting requirements which would allow the EPA to delay and derail new exploration and drilling. It was designed to kill fracking, a key part of America’s energy resurgence, based on unfounded environmentalist fears, namely that fracking poisons drinking water, accelerates climate change, and causes earthquakes. As Investor’s Business Daily commented on the Obama fracking rule enacted in 2015: 

When the Obama administration recently released its new regulations on fracking -- regulations that it said were needed to keep up with the advance and success of the decades-old technology to meet public safety needs -- the Independent Petroleum Association of America and Western Energy Alliance immediately filed suit, saying that the new regs were based on "unsubstantiated concerns" that lacked any scientific basis.

"Hydraulic fracturing has been conducted safely and responsibly in the United States for over 60 years," noted IPAA president Barry Russell, who also pointed out the impact of the new regulations on job and economic growth. Fracking has produced an oil and natural gas boom, making them energy sources of the future, not the past.

The Obama administration doesn't like fracking and wishes that fracking would just go away so it can go on subsidizing the Solyndras of the world. But Russell is right: Fracking is safe, and the new study proves that any concerns are politically motivated fear-mongering.

Published online in late March in Environmental Science and Technology, the study focused on 11,309 drinking wells in northeastern Pennsylvania. It found that background levels of methane in well water are unrelated to the location of oil and gas wells drilled using fracking technology…

Shale formations in which fracking is used are thousands of feet deep. Drinking-water aquifers are generally only a hundred feet deep. There's a lot of solid rock in between. And as we've said, the technology is not new, with the first well employing fracking being drilled in Oklahoma in 1947.

It is fracking that has produced a boom in the production of natural gas, a fossil fuel, that has produced a significant reduction in the U.S. of so-called “greenhouse gases”. As the Washington Times reported:

White House senior advisor Brian Deese cheered the falling carbon dioxide levels at a Monday press conference without mentioning the outsize role played by natural gas, as the cleaner-burning fuel increasingly overtakes coal in electricity generation.

“For those of you who are not breathlessly following the most recent data that has come out, I would note recent data that we’ve seen suggests or finds that for the first half of 2016, energy sector emissions in the United States are actually down 6 percent from last year, and 15 percent from 2005,” said Mr. Deese. “And they’re at their lowest level in nearly 20 years.”

He said nothing about the U.S. natural gas boom, an omission that critics say has become par for the course as the Obama administration highlights renewable energy and emissions restrictions without acknowledging the role of fracking in natural gas extraction.

The fact is that while Obama takes credit for increases in oil production, he conveniently leaves out the fact that due to his administration's extreme reluctance to permit drilling on federal land, all of the increase in production came from private and state-owned land, and, the same goes for natural gas.   On average, the number of leases granted by the Bureau of Land Management to drill on federal land under Obama was far lower than any of the four administrations prior to his.

Obama opposed drilling in a narrow and quite barren portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) which President Trump has opened up to exploration and drilling. Obama blocked offshore drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic:

President Obama on Tuesday formally blocked offshore oil and gas drilling in most of the Arctic Ocean, answering a call from environmentalists who say the government needs to do more to prevent drilling in environmentally sensitive areas of U.S.-controlled oceans.

Obama is invoking a 1953 law governing the Outer Continental Shelf to block drilling in federal waters in the Arctic's Chukchi Sea and most of its Beaufort Sea. He also protected 21 underwater canyons in the Atlantic Ocean from drilling, White House officials said Tuesday…

The announcement locks in a decision Obama made last month to block drilling in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans during an offshore leasing plan that runs through 2022…

Trump has unleashed the American energy industry that Obama put in shackles with both environmental and economic benefits that promise to get ever bigger and more beneficial.  America needs this offshore energy, unless opponents wants us to return to the days of being permanent vassals of OPEC. According to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas off Alaska contain an estimated 23.6 billion barrels of oil and 104.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. According to the American Petroleum Institute’s website Energy Tomorrow, offshore drilling could create 840,000 American jobs and generate $200 billion in revenue to the federal government by 2035.  As the Daily Caller reports:

Offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean has the potential to produce 1.3 million barrels of oil and natural gas per day while generating nearly 280,000 jobs and contribute up to $23.5 billion per year to the U.S. economy, according to a 2013 study by the American Petroleum Institute.

And what about the environmental impact to these allegedly fragile ecosystems? What about the polar bears and the caribou? We heard this apocalyptic song before, when oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was built to carry it southward. When oil exploration began in Prudhoe Bay, 60 miles to the west of ANWR  environmentalists claimed it would yield only a "few months' supply" of oil and would wreck the ecosystem. Prudhoe Bay turned out to be the largest deposit of oil ever found in North America.  As Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation writes in the Daily Signal:

Would oil and gas drillers kill off the eagles, caribou, and polar bears, as the White House warns? These were the arguments made more than 40 years ago against building the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System -- which carries oil from Alaska’s North Slope to the port of Valdez for shipment to the lower 48 states. Over the last 35 years it has carried more than 17 billion barrels of oil, a quantity worth nearly $1 trillion in today’s dollars. At the time, the Sierra Club moaned that the pipeline would mean “the wilderness is forever broken,” while the Wilderness Society said the project would lead to “imminent, grave and irreparable damage to the ecology, wilderness values, natural resources, recreational potential, and total environment of Alaska.” No bird or caribou would be safe from the carnage. Sound familiar?

Instead, the impact on Alaska’s wildlife and natural beauty has been almost nonexistent. A study delivered in 2002 to the American Society of Civil Engineers found that “the ecosystems affected by the operation of TAPS and associated activity for almost 25 years are healthy.” Today the size of the caribou herd in Alaska is estimated at about 325,000 -- four times the number before the pipeline was built.

Offshore oil platforms are not the environmental risk critics say they are and are in fact an environmental bonanza with the platforms serving as artificial reefs that promote an explosion of sea life:

"Environmentalists" wake up in the middle of the night sweating and whimpering about offshore oil platforms only because they've never seen what's under them. This proliferation of marine life around the platforms turned on its head every "environmental expert" opinion of its day…

A study by LSU's Sea Grant college shows that 85 percent of Louisiana fishing trips involve fishing around these platforms. The same study shows 50 times more marine life around an oil production platform than in the surrounding Gulf bottoms.

President Obama has drilled a dry hole with his claim that you couldn’t drill your way out of high energy prices and limited supply and somewhere Sarah Palin is smiling:

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Obama shrugged the idea when Republicans suggested using domestic oil supplies more than ten years ago.

“Readers of pre-millennial vintage may recall the 2008 presidential campaign when Republicans and especially Sarah Palin picked up the chant ‘drill, baby, drill’ as a response to soaring oil prices,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “The theme was much derided, not least by Barack Obama, who as late as 2012 called it ‘a slogan, a gimmick, and a bumper sticker’ but ‘not a strategy.’ Ten years later, who was right?”

Sarah Palin and Donald Trump? You betcha.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.