Contradictions

As the endless ANWR debate continues, George W. Bush said yesterday that allowing drilling would "bring enormous benefits to the American people." Given how well-rehearsed this issue is, I know that to be false, but I didn't realize what Ben at ThinkProgress pointed out, namely that the Department of Energy did a report just last month showing that drilling in ANWR would reduce the price of oil by 75 cents a barrel. That's not 75 cents per gallon for your gasoline, it's 75 cents per barrel of oil -- meaning a reduction in price of substantially less than one percent wholesale and doubtless less than that in terms of retail gasoline.

The striking thing about this is that I doubt anyone is really all that shocked to learn that the president might make statements that contradict the findings of official government reports about the merits of his preferred policy vis-a-vis ANWR. He favors drilling, so he's overstating the benefits. Whether he's lying or not depends on the subjective status of his brain in a way that we can't ever literally know, but he's saying stuff that government reports say is false.

And of course it's well-known that Bush has made claims that contradict official government reports about all kinds of topics, ranging from climate change to tax policy to oil drilling and beyond. And yet if you say he did this exact same thing with regard to making the case for invading Iraq, you're treated as a member of the lunatic fringe. But it's hardly unusual for politicians in general, or Bush in particular, to understate the costs and overstate the benefits of their preferred policies.

Comments

Polls show offshore drilling has 60%+ support nationally.

It's like the license thing, good in principle but it's going to hurt us at the polls.

Posted by MNPundit | June 19, 2008 1:23 PM

If your threshold for a useful step is that it has to save more than $.75/barrel, most conservation efforts aren't worth it either.

Posted by MH | June 19, 2008 1:31 PM

Thats about 2 cents per gallon of gas. Big deal.

Posted by SLC | June 19, 2008 1:34 PM

Luckily, the media will cover both Bush's statement and the $0.75 study. Just like they covered the report that showed BushCo lied us into war.

Posted by John McCain: More of the Same | June 19, 2008 1:35 PM

MH - The threshold is generally political, not economic. E.g., "I agree with this policy, so it's totally worth it. I don't agree with that policy, so it's not."

Posted by mike | June 19, 2008 1:35 PM

Come on Matt, there are other benefits besides a direct reduction in gasoline prices at the pump

Posted by AMH | June 19, 2008 1:38 PM

Bush isn't lying. He's just full of shit. If it served his purposes to say the moon was made of green cheese he'd say it and mean it. If 5 minutes later it served his purposes to be anti-green cheese he'd say only liberals and terrorists were for green cheese.

Posted by joejoejoe | June 19, 2008 1:40 PM

Matt apparently is just learning that politicians lie. He may not have been paying attention, but Clinton lied too, and Reagan, and Nixon, and LBJ, and Kennedy....and one terrible day his world will come crashing down when he finds out that Obama is a politician. One can only assume his faith in Santa Claus will crumble soon after.

What is the point of this post? It's certainly unremarkable for a politician to exagerate the merits of a proposal they are making; this is a dog-bites-man story.

Posted by rab | June 19, 2008 1:43 PM

"we can't ever literally know"

Once that would have been true, but now we have ways of making him talk.

Posted by gcochran | June 19, 2008 1:44 PM

Come on Matt, there are other benefits besides a direct reduction in gasoline prices at the pump

Exactly! Higher profits for Halliburton, ExxonMobil, etc., just to name a few of the amazing benefits ANWR drilling will bring. Matt acts like they don't count or something. But hey, just cause Halliburton moved to Dubai, doesn't mean they're not real Americans, like you and me!

Posted by Glenn | June 19, 2008 1:48 PM

"And yet if you say he did this exact same thing with regard to making the case for invading Iraq, you're treated as a member of the lunatic fringe. But it's hardly unusual for politicians in general, or Bush in particular, to understate the costs and overstate the benefits of their preferred policies."

Doesn't this cut the other way? As Matt notes, politicians always overstate benefits and underestimate costs; why does he think it is such a damning accusation to make against the Bush Administration. In other words, is he the one acting irrationally by feigning outrage that a politician acted like all politicians always act?

Posted by bibby | June 19, 2008 1:48 PM

More fodder for the low-information voter, who they expect will think that offshore drilling and opening ANWAR will cut the price of oil in half if only those democrats got out of the way.

Posted by Helter | June 19, 2008 1:48 PM

Come on Matt, there are other benefits besides a direct reduction in gasoline prices at the pump

Exactly! Higher profits for Halliburton, ExxonMobil, etc., just to name a few of the amazing benefits ANWR drilling will bring. Matt acts like they don't count or something. But hey, just cause Halliburton moved to Dubai, doesn't mean they're not real Americans, like you and me!

Posted by Glenn | June 19, 2008 1:50 PM

there are other benefits besides a direct reduction in gasoline prices at the pump

What, are all those caribou bothering you? Or are you one of those people who think that the Rapture won't come until we use up all of the Earth's resources?

Posted by rea | June 19, 2008 1:51 PM

Damn, I give up commenting here, everything I submit gets posted 2 or 3 times. Sorry folks.

Posted by Glenn | June 19, 2008 1:52 PM

If your threshold for a useful step is that it has to save more than $.75/barrel, most conservation efforts aren't worth it either.

Except for the fact that most conservation efforts don't have the side effect of causing environmental problems.

As for impact, increasing the CAFE standard by 1 mpg would reduce fuel used by about 3.5%. At $4 (low for my area), that's a 14 cents saving per gallon of gasoline. And since the economic disasters that the autommakers told us would be caused by seat belts, air bags, crumple zones, bumpers not made of tin foil, etc. never happened, I think we can safely state that anybody who says raising CAFE will destroy the auto industry is full of sludge. A minor adjustment like this to the CAFE standard could be implemented in 5 years, easily.

Compare that to the figure above that says a 75 cent per barrel savings will translate to 2 cent per gallon of gasoline. And that's in a best case scenario of 10 years.

BTW, who is going to pay for the necessary pipeline? Will they build it with proper supports? The current pipeline leaks in summer due to a melting of the "permafrost" (though obviously not so "perma" anymore if it's melting). The pipeline just lays on the ground and is dependent upon the permanently frozen layer to support it. Oops. Since global warming has accelerated (no matter what the cause), you can't just drop a pipeline on the ground anymore. So who will cough up the cash for this project?

Posted by LFC | June 19, 2008 1:57 PM

I first heard about this from my mother's husband, who is conservative and watches Fox News all day. It was practically the only political thing he was outspoken about to me, and on several occasions.

He's a very nice guy, but not very bright and not very informed, although now that he's retired he watches Fox all day and thinks he's informed.

But he's a good example of how the vast numbers of people like him are strongly influenced by these phony talking points. Anyone who knows anything at all knows that opening ANWR up to drilling isn't going to do very much to ease oil prices or reduce our dependency on the Middle East. I, personally, was very taken aback by his strong feelings on the issue because of this—they were clearly the product of a campaign and not his own personal obsession.

It has legs because it is based upon suspicions against supposedly irrational environmentalists. Personally, I think it's the environmentalists' own fault because there's always been a wing that is manifestly irrational. On the other hand, mainstream environmentalism has been quite successful because less extreme policies are generally those that even contemporary conservative Americans support.

So the trick is to move this opinion on ANWR back from being associated with the extremist environmentalists to the mainstream, which most Americans, GOP and Dems, support. We should recall that the establishment of ANWR and a restriction against drilling had majority support. It's only since an increase in gas prices, worries about dependency on the Middle East, and a conservative PR campaign that opinion has shifted the other way. And mostly that's the product of the campaign taking advantage of the first two.

We can shift opinion back, but it has to be on or radar. I wasn't very effective against my mother's husband because I didn't have any little factoids to throw around and generally wasn't prepared to make a counter-argument, not the least because a counter-argument seemed unnecessary. But we should assume that a counter-argument is necessary and have one at the ready. The DOE's study is a good start.

Moreover, it would be nice if we could not only disprove and resist the idea, but discredit, too, as happened with the gas tax holiday nonsense. Americans, mostly, saw through the opportunism of that idea, and it's very much simple political opportunism driving the ANWR thing, with economic opportunism of some oil companies probably involved, as well. (It's not clear to me that the oil companies are even that keen on drilling in ANWR, but I've not researched that part of the issue.)

Posted by Keith M Ellis | June 19, 2008 1:58 PM

Surely you realize that drilling for oil creates jobs? At every stage? Planning logistics, gathering raw materials, designing and building hundreds of tons of very complex machinery, transporting it out into the ocean, and then finally, operating the damn thing?

Hey, if you wanted, you could even require that all technology and manpower be sourced from US companies! Ask Pemex about this.

I never claimed the benefits would be "enormous" as GW said, but there are more to consider than simply the price at the pump.

Come on Matt, there are other benefits besides a direct reduction in gasoline prices at the pump

Exactly! Higher profits for Halliburton, ExxonMobil, etc., just to name a few of the amazing benefits ANWR drilling will bring. Matt acts like they don't count or something. But hey, just cause Halliburton moved to Dubai, doesn't mean they're not real Americans, like you and me!

Posted by AMH | June 19, 2008 2:02 PM

According to these figures, a 2 cent decrease in the price of gasoline would saved the public around $422 million in 2007.

Posted by A New Fox News Fan | June 19, 2008 2:11 PM

there are other benefits besides a direct reduction in gasoline prices at the pump

As the actual report notes, besides jobs for Americans, opening ANWR reduces our dependence on foreign oil, improves our balance of trade, and will extend the Alaska pipeline's useful life by 10 years. Those are all benefits to which the President was referring.

On a larger note, though, I never understand the line of reasoning that Matthew uses. Yes, ANWR drilling will only be a partial solution to the problem. But that doesn't militate towards not drilling ANWR - rather, it militates towards drilling ANWR and the OCS and exploring oil shale. What kind of moron looks at a problem and says that, since a solution is only partial, we ought not implement that solution at all?

After all, Kyoto is only a partial solution (indeed, a VERY small part of the solution) to global warming - by Matthew's way of thinking, we ought not implement Kyoto, and ought to wait until we find some solution that completely solves the problem.

Posted by Al | June 19, 2008 2:15 PM

According to these figures, a 2 cent decrease in the price of gasoline would saved the public around $422 million in 2007.

Wow! If true, that's just fantastic. In fact, it works out to ... hmmm ... let's see ... just under $1.39 per year per U.S. citizen.

Posted by LFC | June 19, 2008 2:15 PM

At least SOME of the oil companies are "American people," right? Not Royal Dutch Shell, obviously, but what about Texaco?

Posted by dj moonbat | June 19, 2008 2:20 PM

I'll take a buck thirty-nine along with the other benefits drilling in ANWR offers.

Posted by A New Fox News Fan | June 19, 2008 2:21 PM

How many of the posters above know how much recoverable oil is projected to be in ANWR?

Matt, you could do your readers a favor by providing them some quick links to the data. There is so much misinformation out there about ANWR - and just about every other issue. The other day I was reading comments and some guy said there was enough oil in ANWR to last the US 40 years. Ugh. Not even close. This is the kind of crap that necessitates data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Refuge_drilling_controversy
Supporters of the drilling claimed there were as many as 16 billion barrels...Opponents of drilling pointed out that the USGS report actually estimated 7.668 billion barrels.
The US uses ~8 billion barrels per year. ANWR probably has about 1 year's worth of current US consumption.

Posted by Mitch Schindler | June 19, 2008 2:22 PM

The real issue to me is the "values" argument. It's not how much oil we can get from ANWR, or how much environmental damage there will be. It's simply that we, America, put this land aside as a National Wildlife Refuge - a sort of secular hallowed ground. Like Ross Douthat and his porno collection, we promised ourselves we'd leave it untouched, and now we keep coming back to it.

Posted by M | June 19, 2008 2:24 PM

I'll take a buck thirty-nine along with the other benefits drilling in ANWR offers.

I'll take the very long-term benefits of the U.S. being the technological leader in clean energy. Unfortunately, the Chinese are making more moves in that field than we are. Great. One more thing we'll end up buying from overseas rather than exporting.

Posted by LFC | June 19, 2008 2:26 PM

According to the EIA report to which Matthew's post refers: "In 1998, the USGS estimated that between 5.7 and 16.0 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil are in the coastal plain area of ANWR (also referred to as the 1002 Area), with a mean estimate of 10.4 billion barrels, of which 7.7 billion barrels falls within the Federal portion of the ANWR 1002 Area."

Posted by Al | June 19, 2008 2:33 PM

Yes, ANWR drilling will only be a partial solution to the problem.

No, its not a solution at all. It doesn't solve the problems you purport, which is lower gas prices and dependence on foreign oil. With 2.5 years of oil up there, even calling it a band aid is giving it more credit than it deserves.

Posted by Adrock | June 19, 2008 2:36 PM

I'll take the very long-term benefits of the U.S. being the technological leader in clean energy. Unfortunately, the Chinese are making more moves in that field than we are. Great. One more thing we'll end up buying from overseas rather than exporting.

The Chinese would be drilling in ANWR in a second if it belonged to them, so I fail to see how technological advancement in clean energy and exploitation of domestic petroleum sources are mutually exclusive.

Posted by A New Fox News Fan | June 19, 2008 2:47 PM

While we're saving a quarter of a penny per gallon by drilling in the ANWR, perhaps we can drill a few holes some caribou as well - add to the meat supply in the US and the blood pudding supply....heck, maybe we can drill a few leakages in the pipes funneling the oil out of the ANWR and spoil the whole region for the wildlife and foliage living there as well....

What a frigging moronic argument from a truly moronic president and his pathetic lackey (and rapidly dwindling) Republican army in the Senate and House. Drilling in the ANWR and off-shore will make a negligible difference in gas prices. How 'bout trying this on for size:

- Drive less
- Get rid of your Suburban and drive a smaller car
- Walk / cycle more and lose a couple of pounds
- Support the build-out of public transit and then actually use it
- Don't make suburban sprawl even worse by commuting 100 miles each way to work before going back to your monster mcmansion that take a million dollars to heat
- Open your windows. Buy a fan. Buy energy saving light bulbs. then shut the lights off when you leave the room. Support politicans (Democrats) who support the development of alternative energy sources (Wind, solar, hydro, etc) rather than those who sold their souls to the oil industry (Republicans.)

If it takes $4 gas to get the chronically lazy, apathetic American populace to actually change their behavior from being the most environmentally destructive, gas-guzzling, garbage creating and generally careless 1st world society to a people who actually seem to give a damn and now are actively thinking about energy usage and how to conserve and how to develop better energy sources, then thank God for $4 gas. I don't like paying for it either, but it seems like this is the only kick in the ass that works...

Posted by edsbowlingshoe | June 19, 2008 2:55 PM

Perhaps Bush is listening to the Dems in Congress who said that continuing to fill the Strategic Petroleum Preserve at a rate of 70,000 barrels a days was causing an increase of $.26 a gallon in the price of gas. That estimate wasn't supported by DOE, but I don't remember a lot of chortling about it here.

Posted by Thomas | June 19, 2008 3:18 PM

The reality is that we need to conserve as much energy as possible, and develop as much energy as possible.

Even the energy companies will tell you that conservation is a good thing.

Conservation vs. production is a false choice. As is fossil fuels vs. renewables.

We need it all.

Posted by poolside | June 19, 2008 3:32 PM

A New Fox News Fan says 1) we can save 2 cents per gallon by drilling the ANWR, and 2) China would do it so we should as well.

Are we supposed to take these types of arguments seriously? Yeah, we drill the ANWR and I save enough to by a cheeseburger, and we use choking-on-coal-fumes China as our thought leader on this. Jesus...

Posted by edsbowlingshoe | June 19, 2008 3:33 PM

The Chinese would be drilling in ANWR in a second if it belonged to them

Yeah, and China is an environmental nightmare. Have you seen how much smog there is in Shanghai?

Posted by Adam Villani | June 19, 2008 4:19 PM

I live in a small house that is convenient to public transportation and within 2 miles of pretty much any store or service I need. I go to work every day by foot and bus. I've upgraded insulation, windows, lights, and most appliances.

It still takes quite a bit of energy to run things. The problem isn't just ANWR. Anytime somebody proposes a new energy source, large groups organize to stop it. Don't drill here, don't put a windmill there, don't build a reactor anywhere, etc. Old energy sources run down and need replaced, no matter how much you conserve. If the opponents of more drilling seemed less concerned about punishing all those who dare to be middle-class and more concerned with how people are going to keep the house warm and get the kids to school ten years from now, I'd probably take them more seriously.

Posted by MH | June 19, 2008 4:27 PM

I live in a small house that is convenient to public transportation and within 2 miles of pretty much any store or service I need. I go to work every day by foot and bus. I've upgraded insulation, windows, lights, and most appliances.

It still takes quite a bit of energy to run things. The problem isn't just ANWR. Anytime somebody proposes a new energy source, large groups organize to stop it. Don't drill here, don't put a windmill there, don't build a reactor anywhere, etc. Old energy sources run down and need replaced, no matter how much you conserve. If the opponents of more drilling seemed less concerned about punishing all those who dare to be middle-class and more concerned with how people are going to keep the house warm and get the kids to school ten years from now, I'd probably take them more seriously.

Posted by MH | June 19, 2008 4:29 PM

The Chinese would be drilling in ANWR in a second if it belonged to them

Yeah, and China is an environmental nightmare. Have you seen how much smog there is in Shanghai?

Posted by Adam Villani | June 19, 2008 4:30 PM

poolside's comments are right on. We need both conservation and increased production.

Posted by A New Fox News Fan | June 19, 2008 4:37 PM

I'm so tired of fighting this battle.

Let them drill ANWR. Let them open up all the offshore drilling. Them them drill Indian burial grounds, for all I care.

And when prices still don't come down, and the next environmental catastrophe happens, they can have fun explaining their clever scheme.

Posted by Andrew Lias | June 19, 2008 5:18 PM

I'm so tired of fighting this battle.

Let them drill ANWR. Let them open up all the offshore drilling. Them them drill Indian burial grounds, for all I care.

And when prices still don't come down, and the next environmental catastrophe happens, they can have fun explaining their clever scheme.

Posted by Andrew Lias | June 19, 2008 5:20 PM

Department of Energy did a report just last month showing that drilling in ANWR would reduce the price of oil by 75 cents a BARREL.

lol.

say it out loud. like letterman. repeat it a few times. have someone else play paul and repeat it alternating with them.

it's hilarious.

Posted by brenna | June 19, 2008 6:39 PM

What about the Dems approve drilling (for PR purposes) but with a million billion safeguards?

Posted by Mike Mundy | June 19, 2008 6:45 PM

The Chinese would be drilling in ANWR in a second if it belonged to them

The Chinese argument is that as a rapidly-industrialising nation they're entitled to rape their environment the way early industrialisers did. That's a recipe for fucking disaster (James Fallows' blog is just a click away) and the US would do well not to give China more excuses.

Still, for a new troll, you're marginally entertaining in your infantilism.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | June 19, 2008 7:12 PM

The Bush administration was filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to the tune of 70,000 barrels a day until Congress voted to stop them.

Why did Congress stop them? Here's what Nancy Pelosi said: "It could reduce gas prices by 5 to 24 cents a gallon – a critical first step for America’s families, businesses, and the economy."

Got that? 70,000 barrels a day means a reduction of up to $.24 per gallon of gas. Per gallon, not per barrel.

And yet the 1.45 million barrels the DOE thinks ANWR would produce would reduce prices by only $.75 per barrel, not per gallon.

What an unusual pricing model Pelosi must be using.

(But it is nice to see so many people off the peak-oil bandwagon. You can't buy peak oil and the DOE report--they don't go together at all.)

Posted by Thomas | June 20, 2008 12:07 AM