Newt Gingrich criticizes Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat Congress on their refusal to allow an up or down vote on drilling for oil in the US.  Gingrich praises House Republicans for keeping the drilling issue front and center.

h/tip: Hot Air
t/b: Miche…

“But we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling — if everybody was just inflating their tires? And getting regular tune-ups? You’d actually save just as much!”

Ooops!

It’s not a 3% savings, like Obama says. It looks Like Dave Price over at Dean’s World has been crunching some numbers.

How silly is this statement? Doing the math, it looks like he’s off by about an order of magnitude. The DOE link says you can save 3.3% and U.S. consumption is 20.8M barrels a day, half of which is gasoline, so even if fully half the population is driving on very poorly inflated tires you’re talking about only about 165,000 barrels a day, a tenth or less of the millions of barrels a day we could add in production. Hell, the mean estimate for ANWR alone is 780,000 bpd.

Of course, Barack could easily defuse this by admitting he was wrong, but as with the surge he will not. This is why Barack Obama’s team is scared to death of any debate format that doesn’t rely on teleprompters: he’s a walking gaffe-o-matic and too arrogant to admit when he’s wrong — probably partly because the MSM scrambles to explain his mistakes away:

On August 6th, 2008 at 6:39 pm, TheOtherSide said:

If we can’t get it to market in those ten years…very little.

So, tell us, exactly how long a period before payback should we set up before doing anything about anything? Should we limit our future activity to only those things that we will see results in 6 months? Five years? Nine years, 364 days? I know we can’t go beyond that because since you say it will take 10 years to realize any result from starting to drill today, it’s not worth doing at all. So that must mean that anything that takes 10+ years to accomplish shouldn’t even be started.

With thinking like that why is anyone wasting their time trying to come up with a cure for diseases that will one day no longer affect humans as they do today? People have been working on a cure for cancer for decades. What a waste, huh? For that matter why is anyone wasting their time trying to come up with alternative forms of energy? It’s going to take a lot longer than 10 years to come up with something that replaces oil and put the infrastructure in place to make it as easily accessible and affordable as oil (even at $4 / gallon) is today.

Let’s say that if we start drilling today that we don’t realize any drop in price for 10 years (Many experts say and I agree that the 10 year figure liberal keep bringing up is completely bogus. We would start receiving some amount of payback much sooner). OK? Would you be willing to stipulate that we MIGHT receive a price drop after that? Because one thing is guaranteed — if we don’t start drilling our own oil now, in 10 years, the price of gas will be so high that $4 / gallon will look like a steal just like the $1.20 we paid in 1998 does today.

I plan to be right here in 10 years. The liberals must have plans to be elsewhere (one can only hope).

TOS:
“Opening off-shore drilling would have no impact whatsoever on gas prices today.” — Mike Rodgers, a leading oil expert with PFC Energy in Washington

So if we can’t lower gas prices by the close of business today we should just lay down and die? You do that and I’ll support more drilling, refineries, more coal mining and power plants, nuclear and other other viable source of energy.
Now if T. Boone Pickens gets the various states and the Federal government to run power lines across HIS land he will make millions in royalties; sounds like a plan. We do know the current state of technology is not ready for large scale solar/wind power generation but they are viable for small scale local applications. I use a solar panel to charge my marine batteries. But large scale is a bit in the future.

I do in fact support wind and solar power where feasible. But I have news for you: If we start building wind and solar generators in the next year or so it will not lower the price of energy today. So by the logic stated above we should not do so. We call that Short Term Thinking or Chicken Littlism.

I STILL can’t find any spark plugs to tune up my diesel truck ): I Am Whom I Am will be so upset with me!
—
His Messiahship be mocked
Allie OOP OOP be praised

On August 7th, 2008 at 10:18 am, J S Ragman said:

completely agree. even small actions are actions nonetheless.

The appearing with Pelosi was revolting.

Are they going to build some of those new “instant” windfarms? Put up a couple dozen “overnight” nuclear reactors? Maybe have Detroit start producing nothing but electric and hydrogen fuel cell cars for the 2009 model year? How about building some of those new “next day” solar farms in Arizona and New Mexico?

I’m sick of hearing speculation about how long it will take new oil supplies to impact the price of gasoline at the pump. All of these new technologies won’t happen overnight. Let’s get on with it.

I’m not saying bush lifting the ban is absolutely responsible, but i think it’s incorrect to believe that speculators didn’t latch onto that fact, nor are they ignoring the push for drilling that’s going on right now.

Great point, AM! Only rabid, close-minded partisans could deny this glaringly obvious fact.

The President’s voice resonates on Wall St, regardless of what his detractors may claim, and his lifting the ban motivated speculators to find places other than oil to invest their capital.