Texas: Houston-Galveston port now exporting more oil than it’s importing

CFP: Sometimes it makes sense to compromise in politics. Sometimes a deal is a good deal and you should take it, because the country will benefit from it.

And one of the best examples in recent memory is a 2015 deal between the Republican Congress and Barack Obama concerning oil exports and green energy subsidies.

It was actually out of character for Obama to offer that deal.

Obama wanted to extend green energy subsidies for several years. The Republican Congress wanted to kill them, and rightly so. They represent terrible policy. But there was an opportunity to do something even more important and more beneficial for the nation.

Obama will willing to make a deal: If Republicans were willing to extend the subsidies for a few years, he would agree to sign a bill that also included the end of oil export ban that had been in place since the early 1970s.

That was huge. Ever since the so-called energy crisis more than 40 years earlier, the U.S. had intentionally hamstrung itself in international oil markets. We would never export any oil because the thinking was that we needed to keep everything we produced here at home just in case of another emergency. This was panic thinking at its worst. The ability to participate in international energy markets gave U.S. producers a real opportunity to increase their return on investment and impact these markets in a way that benefited both American producers and consumers. The ban was never a good idea, but even leaving that aside, it should certainly have been lifted as soon as the oil embargo ended in the mid-’70s.

Yet it had remained all those years. Republicans took the deal. They gave Obama his green energy subsidies and Obama agreed to lift the oil export ban. How is that working out?

Beautifully