When he was running for the Oval Office four years ago amid $4-a-gallon gasoline prices, then-Sen. Barack Obama dismissed the idea of expanded oil production as a way to relieve the pain at the pump.
"Even if you opened up every square inch of our land and our coasts to drilling," he said. "America still has only 3% of the world's oil reserves." Which meant, he said, that the U.S. couldn't affect global oil prices.
It's the same rhetoric President Obama is using now, as gas prices hit $4 again, except now he puts the figure at 2%.
"With only 2% of the world's oil reserves, we can't just drill our way to lower gas prices," he said. "Not when we consume 20% of the world's oil."
But the figure Obama uses — proved oil reserves — vastly undercounts how much oil the U.S. actually contains. In fact, far from being oil-poor, the country is awash in vast quantities — enough to meet all the country's oil needs for hundreds of years.
The U.S. has 22.3 billion barrels of proved reserves, a little less than 2% of the entire world's proved reserves, according to the Energy Information Administration. But as the EIA explains, proved reserves "are a small subset of recoverable resources," because they only count oil that companies are currently drilling for in existing fields.Contrary to Pres Obama's dire estimate, various federal agencies, (including the US Geological Survey, as I pointed out yesterday), the US contains over 1.5 trillion barrels of recoverable petroleum.
When you look at the whole picture, it turns out that there are vast supplies of oil in the U.S., according to various government reports.
Again, these are Federal Government reports. Is Pres Obama not a member of the Federal Government? Are these reports unavailable to Pres Obama, but available to me and IBD? Is Pres Obama incapable of reading them?
So, Obamaphiles, is your messiah lying to you, or is he ignorant? Because those are the only two possible reasons he keeps repeating the 2% myth. So, which is it?
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