SOTU: Obama’s Sleight of Hand on Oil Production Data

During last night’s State of the Union address, President Barack Obama made the eye-catching claim that, “Right now—right now—American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years.” In fact, this is malarkey, because the increase in oil production has nothing to do with the President’s policies. Indeed, the increase occurred in spite of this administration’s actions. As is explained by our friends at the Institute for Energy Research:

The reality is that oil production on federal lands is falling, while production on private and state lands is rising.[2] There is a long term trend of decreasing oil production on federal lands. In fact, oil production on federal lands has fallen by 43 percent over the past 9 years according to the Obama administration’s Energy Information Administration.[3] And it has dropped rapidly on President Obama’s watch.

IER provides this handy graph in order to help make its point: