By Stephen Macaulay
Once, the Republican Party seemed to be constituted of businesspeople. The Republicans would make money and the Democrats would give it away, was pretty much the notion.
But now the Republican Party seems to be full of people who know nothing about business and economics but plenty about imagined grievance.
At least their leader, Donald Trump, when it comes to issues related to energy, is either willfully ignorant or simply speaks in the context of things that are transactionally beneficial to Donald Trump.
And his supporters cheer.
Trump lets loose with the “drill, baby, drill” mantra. He makes it seem as though there is an insufficient amount of oil drilling going on in the United States. (Funny thing: he seems to underestimate the US across the board. For example, when he talks crime, he doesn’t indicate that in 2020, his final year in office, the violent crime rate in the US was greater than it is in 2024: 398.5 per 100,000 people under Trump, now down to 380.7 per 100,000 people last year under Biden.)
As for the oil drilling, you’d think that there are all manner of horrible regulations and restrictions on how and where drilling can occur, placing the US oil production in trouble.
Guess what?
In 2024 the US produces more crude oil per day than any other country in the world.
As in:
- US: 12.8 million barrels per day
- Russia: 10.5 million barrels per day
- Saudi Arabia: 10.2 million barrels per day
Break out the “USA! USA! USA!” chant.
And again, in 2020 the US produced 11.3 million barrels per day.
Or a 12% increase in oil production under Biden.
Now to be fair, in 2020 there was COVID (and let’s not get into Trump’s pathetic response to that: After he was released from the hospital in October 2020 for COVID treatment, in his first speech, when there were some 220,000 Americans dead from the disease, when there was an increase in hospitalizations, he said: “It’s going to disappear. It is disappearing.”), so petroleum demand was down.
This is how much oil the US produced pre-COVID, when he was in office:
- 2017: 9.3 million barrels per day
- 2018: 10.96 million barrels per day
- 2019: 12.23 million barrels per day
For Trump, peak oil was 12.23 million barrels per day. For Biden peak oil was in 2023, 12.9 million barrels per day.
Yes, Sleepy Joe had more petroleum pumped that Trump.
But here’s a thing.
As people have known since even before Adam Smith (once a hero of the Republicans, now someone forgotten) explained it:
There is supply and there is demand.
And if the supply greatly exceeds the demand, then the producer has to reduce the cost of that commodity, which means the producer doesn’t make as much as it will when demand exceeds supply.
There is something else that needs to be taken into account: Petroleum is a global commodity.
A given oil company is looking to sell its product wherever it can make the most
money — regardless of where it comes from.
In the World According to Trump, there should be oil derricks damn near everywhere.
Hell, put one on the White House lawn if there’s oil below.
But for the oil companies, they’re not in the least bit interested in oversupplying the market.
So (1) the US leads in oil production and (2) oil producers have no incentive to vastly increase their output.
The “drill, drill, drill” may be good for crowd chants, but as for actual policy. . .?