US domestic oil production has jumped by 18 per cent in the past year as the shale boom has expanded, and in the first eight months of this year oil imports were 800,000 barrels a day fewer than a year earlier.

Does self sufficiency in energy sound good?  How about the wealth and increased competitiveness that cheap energy generates?  The main thing Obama and the Democrats could do immediately to cure what ails the economy and make all their socialist schemes affordable would be to release the energy economy to do what it does best.

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America's oil exports rose over the same time by 300,000 barrels a day, so net imports have fallen in just one year by 1.1 million barrels a day, or about 6 per cent of total consumption. If that pace if sustained the International Energy Agency's prediction of self sufficiency for the US by 2030 will prove to be conservative.

Oil production from shale in the US is rising much more strongly than expected because the boom itself is working to shift production into liquids. _TheAge

This puts US President Obama in the position of having to make a hard choice -- something he is not known for doing, if he can avoid it. Nevertheless, Obama's fiscal policies are driving the US into an unprecedented deep pit of debt, while his regulatory policies are destroying economic opportunity across the width and breadth of the private sector. If Obama lets the energy & industrial boom happen -- in spite of his close ties to the green / political / academic / faux environmental complex -- he will lose friends among the fashionable, but will also finally allow a much-delayed economic recovery to begin across much of the US.

The six fastest-growing jobs for 2010-11, according to Economic Modeling Specialists International, are related to oil and gas extraction. In total, nine of the top 11 fast-growing jobs in the nation over the past two years are tied in one way or another to oil and gas extraction.

Over the decade, the energy sector has created nearly 200,000 jobs in Texas, as well as 40,000 in Oklahoma, and more than 20,000 in Colorado. Growth on a percentage basis is even higher in North Dakota, which saw a 400 percent increase in these jobs, as well as Pennsylvania, where jobs increased by 20,000.

The energy revolution presents Obama with the clearest path to drive this critical boost to greater economic growth. New technologies for finding and tapping resources, such as fracking and other new technologies to tap older oil fields, could make America potentially the largest oil and gas producer by 2020, according to the International Energy Agency. _Joel Kotkin