I saw this ad on Fox News this afternoon, and went to the Paul Ryan campaign site to see if they had an embeddable version to help spread it around. They didn’t, so I asked the campaign for permission to put it on my YouTube account. They said yes, so here it is.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNMi5Nj5qfQ[/youtube]
It shouldn’t be a secret that I do support Paul Ryan. I have neither requested nor received any compensation for this ad.
He makes a good point.
Revisions/extensions (9:18 pm 10/20/2008 – steveegg) – Per the below comment, the “millions” has been replaced with “billions”.
Most of the ad is great, but there’s just one part that bothers me: It’s not true that there’s more oil under America than under the entire Middle East. America has an estimated 25
millionbillion barrels in oil reserves, and the Middle east has about 755millionbillion barrels (according to the Dept. of Energy).It’s a pretty big misunderstanding, on either my part or his. Has anybody heard him talk about this more? About what he was referring to?
here’s the DOE data:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/reserves.html
and this is an illustration of the world oil reserves from Sen. Luger’s website:
http://lugar.senate.gov/graphics/energy/graphs/Who_has_oil_small.gif
That DOE data does not include the Green River Formation of oil shale, for which the recoverable estimate from the RAND Corporation is 800 million barrels. The reason why it does not is that particular formation was estimated to be cost-effective to exploit when oil was at $95/bbl in November 2007, when the Energy Information Administration made its estimates and when oil was below $95/bbl.
Shell Oil Company more-recently estimated that, with techniques discovered this year, that oil shale would be cost-effective to exploit with oil around $25/bbl.
Gotcha – thanks for clearing that up for me.
** In my above post, I screwed up the magnitude of the numbers… we’re actually talking about BILLIONS of barrels, not millions.
Not a problem. The DOE/EIA estimate only took into account the oil that was cost-effective to recover at the point it was created.
I’ll correct that above comment to reflect the billions versus millions.