How to Make Drilling for Oil Woke Again

It feels like an eternity, but it was only a decade ago when the political center-left was still for “all of the above” energy sources: fossil fuels and renewables alike. It was the not-so-distant days of Barack Obama, when the US president defended fracking as a force for good, saying there wasn’t a trade-off “between our environment and our economy,” and when drilling, it may surprise some, was still lefty.

But over the years, liberals became increasingly hostile to fossil fuels as the evidence of climate change accumulated. From 2020 onward, the hostility turned into militant opposition, culminating with US President Joe Biden’s election slogan of “no more drilling, period.” It was an era of virtue-signaling, fueled by the nonsensical belief that the days of oil were numbered. Implausible scenarios of collapsing oil demand by 2050 became commonplace.