Oil remains cheap, but politics are increasingly loud.

We're breaking down the energy-related headlines investors may have missed in what 2026 can look

like from here today on Motley Full Money.

Today is Tuesday, December 30th. Welcome to Motley Full Money.

I'm your host, Emily Flippen, and today I'm joined by full analyst Jason Hall and

Key Spites to dig into the latest energy headlines, including the oversupply of oil,

a pause in offshore wind energy projects, and how energy investors should be feeling heading

into the new year. Over the past year, oil prices

have continued a pretty substantial march down. There's lots of, of course, different ways

to measure oil prices. But in general, we can say prices are broadly down about 20% today

than they were at this point last year, largely driven by concerns about oversupply. Obviously,

production here in the United States, but also OPEC, adding some supply points over the course of the past year. Jason, I know this is your industry, and it seems like everyone is afraid of the oversupply of oil. I mean, might be part of the reason why energy stocks have broadly underperformed the market in 2025, given the volatile nature of oil prices. How do you think investors should be thinking about the energy sector as an investment? I think it's a starting point. I follow the banking industry really close to, and the banking executive tells a story about one time being asked by his child, dad, what's a banking crisis? And he says, oh, it's something that happens about once a decade. And in the oil industry, it's the same thing. What's an oil crisis? It's

something that happens about, well, once every five years, actually. It tends to happen more often.

Oil prices are actually down more than half from the peak just a few years ago. And this is a common

refrain in the industry, in the 15 years that I've followed it, there are always geopolitical factors that come into play.

But it seems like the velocity of the global oil and even the gas prices has increased because the supply dynamics have really, really shifted.

U.S. oil production peaked back in 1970. We passed that peak again in 2014. But again, think about that, from

1970 to 2014 before we got back to those prior levels. So there were 40 years where oil

production declined in the U.S. before bottoming in 2009. Then we saw the shale revolution

starts to kick in. And it was 2014 when we finally returned

back to those, you know, 1970 levels. And then we've hit a new record every single year.

A lot of people don't realize, you know, there's the political narrative that depending on where

...