'PEAK' OIL SHORTAGE IS POLITICAL FICTION, NOT REALITY

One anti-drilling argument often invoked by environmentalists is that either America or the world is running out of oil. Neither assertion is true. For example, in the 1970s, the Club of Rome guaranteed that we'd run out of oil by now. Yet the amount of available oil has expanded greatly since then:

• According to U.S. Geological Survey estimates, we've got just shy of 6 trillion barrels of oil or its equivalent.
• Ronald Bailey, Reason magazine's science correspondent, writes that this means 82 percent of the world's already tapped endowment of oil and gas remain to be used.
• Bailey, who did a thorough survey of the "peak oil" debate, found that most of the world's leading analysts and agencies simply do not think we are running out of oil.

The disinformation cycle keeps repeating itself:

• In 1995 the USGS said that the Bakken formation, in North Dakota and Montana, had a modest amount of oil; it now believes there are 3 to 4 billion barrels there -- 25 times the 1995 estimate.
• The Minerals Management Service (MMS) insisted in 1987 that there were a "mere" 9 billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico; 20 years later that estimate is up to 45 billion.
• Prudhoe Bay in Alaska has already generated 15 billion barrels of oil and natural-gas liquids even though the government insisted the needle would hit empty at 9 billion; right now, the MMS conservatively guesses that the Atlantic and Pacific Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) has 14.3 billion barrels of oil and 55 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

And none of these figures included extracting oil from shale. Estimates put the amount of shale oil in the Intermountain West at 1.2 to 1.8 trillion barrels. If we chose to recover just the 'easiest' 800 billion barrels of that, it alone would represent an American reserve three times Saudi Arabia's oil stockpile.

[Again: the history of oil use has been one of constantly expanding excess reserves discovered above and beyond consumption. The claim of 'peak oil' is a canard completely contrary to all empirical facts. Despite our every increasing appetite for oil & gas are discovery of new reserves - when we bother to look {currently illegal in most of the US} - has consistently outstripped demand and resulted in an ever expanding surplus of reserves.

Our {non} 'Energy' policy is insane and costing us more than a retarded economy, it's literally funding our enimies (Russia, S. American tyrants, middle east} and threatens to strip our children of thier liberties wholesale behind the global-warming canard.

It's past time we demand real change in this area.]

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