BURN: Obama's Lips Move, So You KNOW He's...

Being untruthful is one of the things THE ONE does surpassingly well.  One of a few things.  He does it virtually every time he speaks, and from the Oval Office he did it as he rarely has before.

One thing he said that was sort of true, but said in support of a larger lie, is that oil is a finite resource.  Wul. Duh.  All resources are finite, ultimately, including our leasehold on our happy little planet.  Obama was, of course, intimating that we are just running out of oil.  That is not true.  He also said "part" of the reason we drill in the vastly more risky deep waters of the Gulf Of Mexico is because we have used up oil we could access on land or shallower water.  Of course, that is simply a lie in the larger sense, too.

Environmental BS, resulting in regulatory BS, is the reason we drill wells like Deep Horizon.  There are MANY attractive places on our land and in our near waters for us to find oil and gas...places where we know they wait.  We can't get to them only because of paper.

But what about the idea that we are close to running out of oil?  It is a case without evidence.  In fact, all evidence shows otherwise.

As Jonah Goldberg wrote today:

Matt Ridley, author of the indispensable new book The Rational Optimist, notes that history is full of examples of mankind literally running out of “renewable resources” or effectively exhausting them—mastadons, whales, passenger pigeons, guano, Lebanon cedars, etc.—but the one resource everyone has insisted is about to disappear keeps increasing. “In 1914, the U.S. Bureau of Mines predicted that American oil reserves would last ten years,” Ridley writes. In 1939, the Department of Interior said American oil would last 13 years. Twelve years later, it said oil would last another 13 years. President Jimmy Carter announced in the 1970s that  “we could use up all the proven reserves in the world by the end of the next decade.”

And yet, Ridley goes on to say, “In 1970, there were 550 billion barrels of oil reserves in the world and between 1970 and 1990 the world used 600 billion barrels of oil. So reserves should have been overdrawn by 50 billion barrels by 1990. In fact, by 1990 unexploited reserves amounted to 900 billion barrels.” And that doesn’t count the tar sands in Alberta or the shales of Venezuela and the Rocky Mountains, which collectively contain 6 trillion barrels of heavy oil, 20 times the proven reserves in Saudi Arabia.

Thomas Sowell wrote on this in Basic Economics.  "Known reserves" is a concept that depends on how much we are willing to spend on "knowing".  At points in time, knowing where oil is and how much there is can be prohibitively expensive.  But as technology improves, the price of knowing drops.  Our knowledge expands, and with it "known reserves" expand.  That is one great fallacy of "peak oil".

These are simple economic truths.  They are not complex, or hidden.  Therefore, I consider it likely that Barack Hussain Obama has no idea of them.  Not because he is stupid, but because he is the most ignorant man ever to be President Of The United States.