Democrats Prove We Can Drill Our Way Out Of The Oil Problem

The US produces 40% of the oil it consumes, is this a sign of dependency or economic efficiency?

The presidential debate between McCain and Obama recently came and went and Barack Obama managed to squeeze in the Democratic mantra for this election year regarding oil.  We have all heard it before and it goes like this: The United States possesses only three percent of the world oil reserves and yet we consume twenty-five percent of world oil production. Therefore, we cannot drill our way out of the energy crisis.

As the thinking goes, since we Americans consume twenty-five percent of the oil, sit on only three percent, and are only five percent of the world population; we should be ashamed of ourselves for our gluttony, see the futility in domestic drilling, and, most important, vote Democratic because they have a better understanding of fairness and common sense.  Before we do any of these things, however, I think we need to further examine the Democratic math of the 2008 election.

To begin with, depending on the source, the United States imports approximately 60 percent of its oil.  The flip side of this statistic is that the United States produces forty percent of the oil it consumes.  Now forty percent (what we produce for ourselves) of twenty-five (the percentage of what we consume of the world output) is ten, which means we produce and we consume ten percent of the flowing oil in the world.

Since I believe there is no reason to feel guilty about consuming what we produce (you can if you want to), we Americans should instead feel guilty only about our fifteen percent world oil consumption, rather than twenty-five percent world oil consumption.

However, if you work with the math, you will see that there should be no reason for any guilt because there is more than enough oil to go around for everybody. To begin with, American ingenuity now produces ten percent of the world’s flowing oil supply while we sit upon only three percent of the world’s reserves.  If ten percent of the world’s oil consumption can be produced by only three percent of the world’s oil reserves, then one hundred percent of the world’s oil consumption should be able to be produced by only thirty percent of the world’s oil reserves, leaving a staggering seventy percent of the world’s oil reserves for the future.

Of course, oil reserves and oil consumption are two different things, apples and oranges, so to speak.  But don’t tell me, I’m only working with the math the Democrats provided this election year.