Posted by
RightTeacher on Sunday, September 28, 2008 12:14:42 PM
There are three kinds of liars, we are told, liars, statisticians and democrats.
How many times have you heard something like, "We can't drill our way out of this. We have 3% of the worlds oil reserves, but we consume 25 percent of production."
Apples and oranges.
The oil reserves are much larger than the amount that is produced every year. If this wasn't true, then the world would run out of oil within one year. In fact, since we've been drilling for a century, and expect to be drilling for quite a while longer, I would say the reserves are vastly greater than annual production. It may even be true (it probably is) that 3% of the worlds reserves is much, much greater than 25 percent of the oil production.
This is not to say that we can drill our way out of this, but the assertion often made by the democrats is that we could only ever produce one eight of our oil consumption (3%/24%) is not supported by the statistic. Saying that we have one thirtieth of the worlds reserves doesn't prove that we can't increase our production to 50% or 80% of our consumption.
World reserves are irrelevant. US reserves are relevant only to the extent that they inform how much we might increase production. The only truly relevant numbers are our consumption, our current production and how much we might be able to produce if we were able to explore on oil fields where we're currently prevented from exploring.
So until they start comparing consumption to current and potential production, we need to call them on it every single time until their apples and oranges comparison is seen as the statisticians lie that it truly is.