The Question Beneath Energy Independence

U.S. energy has done a quiet 180. For the first time in more than four decades, the country now produces more energy than it consumes—a reversal that took just over a decade to achieve. Beneath the fossil fuels we’re extracting lies a deeper challenge, one that extends beyond energy into fast-moving industries like AI: how do we convert collective success into local, shared prosperity?

As recently as 2007, the U.S. imported more than 40% of our energy. That dependence limited our foreign-policy flexibility and pushed us into uneasy friendships with authoritarian producers. Energy security often meant overlooking political values in exchange for oil and gas. Today, that constraint has eased. The shift was driven largely by hydraulic fracturing, a technique that injects high-pressure fluid and sand into dense rock formations, creating fractures that allow oil and natural gas to flow. Since 2007, crude oil production has increased by roughly 60 percent, while natural gas production has grown by nearly 90 percent.

This transformation was not the green revolution many hoped for. Fossil fuels make up 88% of our energy. Still, the U.S. is also one of the world’s largest producers of renewable energy, second only to China.

There are 82 countries that only produce renewable energy. Countries such as Greenland, Uruguay, and Singapore, depend only produce wind, solar, or hydro power because of constraints, not altruism. every single one of these 82 countries need to import energy to meet their domestic demand.

The abundance beneath our feet is immense. Fossil fuels are the compressed remains of plants and microorganisms that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, transformed by heat, pressure, and geology into coal, oil, and natural gas—ancient biological energy repurposed for modern use. Talk about life after life!

The U.S. is unusually rich in these resources because of our geologic history. Vast prehistoric seas, coastal swamps, and sedimentary basins formed around regions like Appalachia, the Gulf Coast and Texas, and the Rocky Mountain interior. These thick, organic-rich rock layers explain why fossil fuels are concentrated where they are—and why modern extraction techniques like hydraulic fracturing have proven especially productive in the U.S.

There are seven horsemen to our modern energy system, but any serious conversation about American energy starts in Texas. The state sits atop three of the most productive hydrocarbon basins in the world—Permian, Eagle Ford, and Haynesville—because of deep, organic-rich sedimentary layers laid down over hundreds of millions of years. Together, these regions helped turn the U.S. into the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas and a net energy exporter for the first time in decades. That shift has had enormous geopolitical consequences, weakening the leverage of petro-states abroad and insulating the U.S. from energy shocks. But the economic rewards of this transformation have not been distributed evenly across the regions that made it possible.

Many of the counties powering this energy boom still fall well below national averages on basic measures of well-being. The Anadarko Basin, spanning parts of Oklahoma and Texas, stands out in particular: unemployment is more than 10% higher than the U.S. average, poverty rates are roughly 25% higher, and the share of children living in grandparent-led households is about 15% above average. Appalachia—the nation’s highest-producing gas region—has long faced similar structural decline. The only reason it does not appear worse in the data shown here is because the highlighted counties represent the narrow slice of Appalachia engaged in hydraulic fracturing. The broader region has endured decades of deindustrialization, population loss, and public-health crises, themes captured vividly in Demon Copperhead, Hillbilly Elegy, and The Glass Castle. 

The Blue Ridge Mountains, in particular, have become a kind of mirror for the American condition: immense natural wealth paired with persistent economic fragility. To understand Appalachia is to understand the decline of the American Empire.

This pattern is not unique to fossil fuels. It reflects a deeper failure to intentionally convert extractive success into collective gain. The United States has never offered an oil dividend to the communities whose land, labor, and environmental exposure made energy independence possible. Instead, value has flowed upward—to firms, shareholders, and consumers—while many producing regions remain economically brittle. 

As we enter the next phase of technological transformation, this lesson matters. AI is powered not by oil, but by data—personal, behavioral, and collective data generated by millions of individuals every day. Data is fast becoming the world’s most valuable commodity, yet we have not meaningfully answered how its benefits should be shared.

If everyone contributes to the raw material of AI, then growth should not accrue to a narrow set of owners alone. The energy transition showed us what happens when we fail to tie individual contribution to collective reward. We now face a chance to do better. The question is whether we can design systems—economic, legal, and political—that link personal freedom and participation to shared prosperity, rather than repeating the extractive model that left so many energy-rich regions behind.