Free Republic

Petrotyrants: If there was any doubt the U.S. shale revolution is breaking the dominance of unsavory energy producers on global oil supplies, look no further than last week's OPEC meeting, where the alarm bells were going off. At Friday's Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries meeting in Vienna, the mask of non-chalance about America's new fracking energy boom came off. After years of dismissing U.S. energy production as insignificant and expensive, OPEC suddenly said it would "study" the growth in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, a deceptively bland response to the biggest challenge the cartel has ever faced on its monopoly....

Oil & Gas/Fact & Fiction SeriesStrategy: Wittingly or not, President Obama has contributed to high oil prices by stymieing U.S. production. But if that's the idea, it makes sense to secure energy abroad. He hasn't. In fact, Obama's stated policy, in his March 30, 2011, energy speech has been a crude central planner's diktat of reducing oil imports by a third over the next 10 years and replacing them with increased production of biofuels and other unproven "green" energies yet to be developed. Net result: high oil prices and reduced U.S. access to overseas suppliers. A shrewder strategy would have...