Spare us, please. Via the AP:

Setting the stage for upcoming restrictions on coal-fired power plants, the Obama administration is making a concerted effort to cast its energy policy as an economic success that is creating jobs, securing the nation against international upheavals and shifting energy use to cleaner sources.

In a 42-page report to be released Thursday, the White House argues that significant increases in the domestic production of natural gas and reductions in oil consumption have better positioned the United States to advance its economic and environmental goals.

Few of the report’s conclusions are new, but it includes a detailed analysis of how past reliance on petroleum imports made the U.S. economy especially susceptible to oil price shocks, a vulnerability that White House economists say has been diminished by a reduced U.S. demand for foreign oil. …

While the White House economic report does not address those criticisms directly, it says greater domestic energy production, the use of wind and solar power and the reduction in oil consumption “have had substantial economic and energy security benefits, and they are helping to reduce carbon emissions in the energy sector and thereby tackle the challenge posed by climate change.”

A quarter of the report is devoted to analyzing the economic impact of the United States’ shift from importing more energy than it produced to producing more than it imports.

Yes, which is largely thanks to the oil-and-gas production boom that has overwhelmingly gone down on state and private lands because of technological innovation in the private sector, and hardly at all thanks to the Obama administration’s deliberately slowed-down drilling permit processes and a handful of federally subsidized/technologically questionable solar farms. The fact that we are producing more oil and gas been a separate phenomenon from their ostensibly “all of the above” energy strategy, but they are perfectly happy to imply that they deserve the credit for it now that it’s one of the few really robust things we have going for us.

Here’s the White House’s report if you’re at all interested, but as the Associated Press suggests, there isn’t much new there — this is basically part of their preemptive one-two punch against the inevitable pushback they are going to get with their new regulations for existing power plants. First, they released a frightening report on the many disastrous consequences of climate change already among us, and then they release a report about the awesomeness of their energy strategy just to oh-so-humbly remind us all how very much they have supposedly done for us. Read: You will abide by our new emissions standards, no matter the consequences, and you will like it.