Man, turn off your Fox News and look at some actual numbers. From Forbes:
?Recent history in the coal industry definitely supports the anti-fossil fuel narrative of President Obama. In 2008, President Bush’s last year in office, the U.S. produced 1.06 billion metric tons of coal -- an all-time high. By 2015 it had fallen to 813 million metric tons. Final data for 2016 won’t be available for several months, but during the first six months of this year the EIA reported that domestic coal production had fallen to an annualized rate of 667 million metric tons. That marks a decline of 37% in coal production during Obama’s presidency.
Natural gas production actually started to rise in 2006, and then rose each year for the next ten years. Thus, through seven of President Obama’s eight years in office, natural gas production rose. In President Bush’s last year in office, U.S. dry natural gas production was 20.2 trillion cubic feet (tcf). By 2015 that had risen to 27.1 tcf -- an increase of 34%. Even though this year natural gas production is likely to retreat to ~24 tcf, President Obama did preside over the highest U.S. natural gas production levels in history.
The surge in oil production began a couple of years later than the uptick in natural gas production. In fact, it coincided with President Obama’s first year in office. Following eight straight years of declines during the Bush Administration, oil production rose for the first seven years of the Obama Administration. From 5 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2008, crude oil production rose by 88% to 9.4 million bpd in 2015. Oil production rose during the Obama Administration at the fastest rate in the 150-year history of the U.S. oil industry.
Nuclear power consumption was relatively stable during Obama’s presidency, but renewables surged across the board.
Biofuel production rose in all but one of the years Obama has been in office, but this was due to the Renewable Fuel Standard that was passed in 2005 and expanded in 2007. Even so, President Obama did nothing to get in the way of the rapid growth of the biofuel industry, which saw production rise by 62% between 2008 and 2015.
The bigger story, however, was the explosion of wind and solar power during the Obama Administration. Again, both started to grow during the Bush Administration, but the forced tilt away from coal provided a tremendous boost to wind and solar power. During the last year of the Bush Administration, wind and solar power respectively supplied 56 Terawatt-hours (TWh) and 1.6 TWh.
By 2015 those consumption numbers for wind and solar power had grown to 193 TWh and 39 TWh. That translates to a 245% gain in wind power and a whopping 2300% gain in solar power production over the first seven years of the Obama Administration. And unlike oil and gas, these numbers are likely to grow again in 2016.
Certainly some of President Obama's decisions have been viewed by the fossil fuel industry as hostile. And President-elect Trump will work hard to erase Obama's energy legacy. Nevertheless, the huge irony of Obama's presidency is that despite his reputation as an anti-energy president, he has presided over the largest expansion of energy production in U.S. history.