...AND CHEAPER...:

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The first, and least foreseen, development since 2008, is that America is rapidly turning from a consumer into a producer nation. On economic grounds, its expanding energy horizons are manna from heaven. When Mr Obama was elected, the US was importing almost two-thirds of its oil. That number is down to below almost half and falling. In 2008, King Coal still dominated US electricity production. Last month natural gas supplanted coal as the largest source of US power supply.

So dramatic are America's finds, analysts talk of the US turning into the world's new Saudi Arabia by 2020, with up to 15m barrels a day of liquid energy production (against the desert kingdom's 11m b/d this year). Most of the credit goes to private sector innovators, who took their cue from the high oil prices in the last decade to devise ways of tapping previously uneconomic underground reserves of "tight oil" and shale gas. And some of it is down to plain luck. Far from reaching its final frontier, America has discovered new ones under the ground.

The second is political. Even without a deep recession and the subsequent weak recovery, America's new energy abundance would have altered the mood. But the combination of the two has killed off talk of tackling climate change (barring Mr Obama's brief aside to Rolling Stone). In 2008, John McCain, the Republican candidate, had a cap-and-trade plan to curb carbon emissions. In 2012, Mr Romney avoids the subject altogether.

Both positions capture the temper of their times. So too does Mr Obama's altered language. Fate has offered him a windfall. According to IHS Cera, the energy research group, hydraulic fracturing alone has created 600,000 jobs in the US - almost exactly as many employees as have been shed by state and local governments since 2009. Think of how much worse the jobs picture would be without the energy boom.

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