"Supply and Demand" - 101

Cal Thomas has a good column on oil, it's prices, and what we could have done! We can still do some of this, but the impact would be years away... But the dirty little secret - "Big Oil" ain't the major problem, those that want you to believe "Big Oil" is the problem, is the problem.

In Defense of 'Big Oil'

According to government estimates, there is enough oil in areas accessible to America - 112 billion barrels - to power more than 60 million cars for 60 years. The Outer Continental Shelf alone contains an estimated 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Had President Clinton not vetoed exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in 1995, when oil was $19 a barrel, America would currently be receiving more than 1 million barrels a day domestically, all of it taken by better technology than existed more than 30 years ago. That was when the Alaskan pipeline was built despite protests from environmentalists who claimed it would destroy the caribou. It didn't, but the environmentalists are back with the same discredited arguments. Because most of the oil remains "off-limits," we are becoming more dependent on foreign oil.

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