Another GOP Oil-Drilling Myth Is Born!
By Eric KleefeldTPM
July 21, 2008
As you know, we've been posting here regularly about the GOP's frequent pushing of the myth that China is drilling for oil off American shores.
Well here's another outlandish oil-drilling line: If not for the Dems in Congress, gas would cost two bucks a gallon!
Here's what Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota had to say in an op-ed for National Review, promoting drilling in ANWR:
The fact of the matter is that Congress is standing in the way of $2-a-gallon gas. It is Speaker Pelosi and the House Democrats who are refusing to let commonsense energy legislation come to the floor.That's right: Bachmann says that we can cut the price of gas from over four dollars down to two, a change of more than 50%, by just opening up some new drilling. What wonderful news!
The problem, however, is that this just isn't true when you're working on the scale of a vast global marketplace.
In the case of ANWR, a Department of Energy study this past May found that drilling there could potentially lower the price of a barrel of oil by a mere 75 cents -- only enough to lower the price of a gallon of gas by about two cents, and it would take until the year 2025. Proposed offshore drilling plans for other areas have yielded similar numbers, too.
Oh well. Lowering the price by two dollars, or two cents -- what's the difference?
We'll be hearing a lot more of this line over the next few months.
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1 Comments:
As the faithful opposition, I will point out the double-standard.
Democrats are always quick to point out that things happened on someone's watch and that who ever is on watch is culpable.
9/11, Iraq, Katrina, etc... all happened on Bush's watch, therefore, he is to blame regardless of the circumstances that led up to the events.
Well, it is quite true that since the Democrats won the Congress in 2006, that gas has gone up to $4. It is quite fair to point out that this coincides with the rise to power for Pelosi and Reid. The national average of gas in 2006 was at $2.10 when Pelosi and Reid became leaders in the House and Senate. The national average is just over $4 per gallon today.
So, it wasn't a myth that 'Bush knew' (to quote a NYT article in 2002), but it is a myth that the price of gas began its meteoric rise when Pelosi and Reid became leaders? And that Bachmann is some sort of boob for using arguments that Democrats use ad nauseum to make their case?
You're not fooling anyone. And, of course, it always takes someone with my political accumen and immutable arguement skills to set the record straight - which I am always glad to do on these pages!
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