00:00 Josh Lipton

Well, decades of expansion in US oil drilling significantly impacted the Trump administration's ability to manage Iranian hostilities. This expansion bolstered US energy independence, shifting the country from being heavily reliant on Middle East oil imports to becoming a major exporter. This given the US some leverage, but it's not without its geopolitical challenges. Our Washington correspondent, Ben Worsko during a Santa, put this history into some context. Ben.

00:50 Ben Worsko

Yeah, Josh. So this, this, as you've been talking about in the previous segment, this oil story is kind of the story that wasn't over this conflict so far. Oil prices are now down below where they were 12 days ago when this conflict got underway. And this is because of these historical trends you're talking about, which is that US oil production has grown tremendously. It's almost, it's nearly tripled over about the last 15 years. This is a trend that's spanned Democratic and Republican administrations, and has been driven by the fracking boom. A stat I learned sort of reporting for the story today is that about two-thirds of US crude oil production is in part due to fracking. So fracking is what's driving this and it's what's driving this expansion. And as you've mentioned, this really does change some of the geopolitical calculations that we've seen. A lot of analysts have been out front to say this shows that the US economy is more buffered from oil price shocks going up and down than it has been in the past. And kind of gives the president, like President Trump, more leverage to weather these. Doug Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum has made this point strongly. And there's also really interesting academic literature about how the just increased number of people that work in the oil industry in the US means that oil prices are good for them, and it kind of balances things out macroeconomically, at least in the US economy when oil prices rise to a modest amount. Obviously, there's real limits to that. And we saw some commentary from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell before Congress today, saying, sort of underlining how the limits are here, which is what you've been talking about, which is that oil prices make their oil companies make their own decisions about drilling. Trump likes to say he can watch companies and ask them to keep oil prices down or drill new wells, but they make their own decisions. And as Powell says today, this sort of a shock absorber, there's some questions about how durable this will be going forward, but it's clearly a change from what we saw even 15 years ago.

04:31 Josh Lipton

All right. Thank you, Ben. Appreciate it.