Fracking king Harold Hamm just fracking made it up

When listening to Donald Trump, it’s sometimes hard to tell if he knows he’s lying, or if he just repeats the chatter of the gerbils in his mind. But with Trump’s prospective energy secretary, fracking billionaire Harold Hamm, you don’t have to worry. He know’s he’s pulling it out of his fracking … wherever. He simply doesn’t give a damn about the truth.

Speaking last night at the Republican convention, Hamm had this to say about the abundance of natural gas and oil that’s come from shale fracking.

President Obama chose not to get it, and he has tried to destroy this renaissance and all its benefits. Instead, he turned on Iranian oil, gave them the bomb, billions of dollars and vilified Israel. Why would he do that?

Yeah, why? Obama gave Iran the bomb? Obama vilified Israel? Even at the RNC, that rhetoric drew more huhs than hurrahs from the crowd. If Obama was trying to stop the growth of the oil industry over the last seven years, he’s not been very effective at it. But Hamm wants even the weak environmental rules that now place some limits on fracking removed, so he didn’t let up on the lies.

Obama imposed punitive regulations to stop this renaissance. And in his administration’s very own words, they want to crucify America’s oil and gas producers.

What’s that about? Well, back in 2010 Obama …  Sorry, make that the Secretary of Energy ... No? Well then the head of the EPA ... Wait, how about a low-level EPA regional administrator? Yeah, that guy. A regional EPA administrator said that the way they stopped violations was to grab the first rule breakers they saw and “crucify them,” so that everyone else would know they were serious and follow the rules. And that’s how Obama threatened to nail up the industry.

The truth is that oil and gas does best in democratic administrations.

“The industry has actually historically done better under Democratic presidents during my 42 years, going back, than under Republican presidents,” said Scott Sheffield, chairman and CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources, which concentrates its fracking operations in the Permian Basin in West Texas.

Just like the rest of the economy.

Bonus: While we’re busting energy myths, here’s a big one. That “war on coal” Republicans like to talk about. There really was one, and Harold Hamm waged it. His expansions in North Dakota not only drove the cost of natural gas down, he made the long term agreements that allowed power plants to convert from coal to gas. So all those coal miners Mike Pence was crying about in his speech? It was one of his warm-up acts who put them out of work.