Adventures in Missing the Point 1

Senator Obama has said many times on the campaign trail:

“America has 3% of the world’s oil reserves and uses 25% of the oil.”

His point is apparently that we cannot “drill our way” out of the energy crisis.

Has anyone claimed that we could? Drilling will not solve our long term problem. Drilling will ease our short term situation.

The way Sen. Obama talks, you’d think all kinds of alternative energy technologies are mere months away from commercial use. The truth is we have no idea how long it would take to switch our economy to non-fossil fuel energy.

We do know that we’re sitting on a lot of fossil fuel, though, and that accessing it would lower prices and loosen some of our entanglements in the Middle East.

Sometimes I think Sen. Obama has another “point” in his 3%/25% line. He likes to point out that we use so much of the world’s oil.

Assuming his numbers are correct, we use 25% of the world’s oil supply. We also produce 20-30% of the world’s GDP. That seems like a fair trade.