Good story in the Times today. Boils down to this: The federal government wants more money and more oversight on oil and gas drilling in public lands out West. Makes sense to me. It’s been well-reported that the Bush administration gave drilling companies copious rights at bargain prices while undervaluing oil and gas resources owned by the American people.
American Petroleum Institute’s president, Jack Gerard, makes an appearance in the article. He said the decision by the Interior Department was a setback for the economy. I’m not sure about that. It might be a setback, however, for some of API’s members who have grown used to sucking oil out of places such as Colorado and Wyoming and paying next to nothing in royalties.
Next Gerard cleverly misuses a fact to try and illustrate how the Obama administration has been starving the American people of home-grown energy. According to the Times, Gerard says “that federal revenue from oil and gas leases in the region known as the intermountain West had fallen by more than 80 percent” during 2009.
That might be true. But he failed to cite the fact that the price of oil in 2009 was basically HALF of what it was in 2008. So there’s a 50% drop right there. Add in the fact that demand and consumption is WAY down in the U.S. since the spring of 2008 and, whoa, there you have your 80% drop. (The oil and gas fields of the Mountain West will be some of the first to shut off when demand drops as their production costs tend to be quite a bit higher than those in Alaska and Texas.)
Nice use of a “fact” by the API. Too bad it came with none of the relevant context.
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