of all the lies we’re told about high gas prices,

which is the biggest?

LIE #1: We’re not allowing the poor oil companies enough access to federal lands (coastal):

President George W. Bush was to call Wednesday on Congress to end a decades-old ban on offshore oil drilling, as a way to tap new energy sources to combat soaring gasoline prices.
…
Bush’s statement comes one day after Republican presidential candidate John McCain called for the federal government to scrap the 27-year-old US moratorium on offshore oil drilling.

I shouldn’t be surprised that Bush and McCain are too stupid to know the difference between a ban and a moratorium, but here goes: there is a lot of drilling offshore in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of California. Many of the Gulf wells were actually taken off-line when oil prices dropped in the late 1980s because it simply wasn’t economically viable.

What there has been since 1981 is a moratorium on new drilling. And this moratorium has not been the result of rabid environmentalists’ demands, but the demands of California’s and Florida’s tourism industries (proof: the ban has been instated/continued by the Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush Administrations).

California and Florida are #1 and #2 in terms of destination vacation states, with Florida earning more than $50 billion annually from tourism-related sales tax revenue alone. That is a golden goose neither state wants to sully with oil slicks and tar balls.

It’s safe for Bush and McCain to crow about offshore drilling, though, because it accomplished their three primary goals:

• looking busy (“I’m doin’ somethin’ about them high gas prices”);

• taking the P.R./political pressure off the record-profit-making oil companies by furthering the lie that this is a supply problem (remember how Bush failed to get the Saudis to “loosen the taps”?);

• calling for something that they know is politically DOA, so no harm/no foul to either their primary constituency (oil companies) or their secondary constituency (the tourism industry).

LIE #2: We’re not allowing the poor oil companies enough access to federal lands (inland):

WASHINGTON (May 29, 2008) – More than 44 million acres of public lands are leased for oil and gas development, according to a new Wilderness Society analysis of Interior Department data. The analysis points to an explosion of drilling on federal lands, with 7,124 drilling permits (APDs) issued in 2007, a new record for the Bush Administration. Nationwide, the leasing is outstripping the oil and gas industry’s capacity to drill, as industry is drilling on only a quarter of the leases they hold.
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Summary: Applications for Permits to Drill (APDs) Approved by BLM, 2001-2007

Colorado: 2,909
Montana: 843
New Mexico: 7,606
Utah: 2,955
Wyoming: 18,613
Rocky Mtns: 32,926

We’re not stopping them from drilling. The oil companies are enjoying the benefits of locking up leases (to keep them away from their competitors) while at the same time limiting production to keep prices artificially high.

Nice work if you can get it.

But again, calling for new drilling makes Bush & McCain look like they’re doing something about the problem while covering for the oil companies and pushing back against those nasty environmentalists who want to take away your SUV and force you to ride the bus with stinky homeless people.

LIE #3: Those dirty fucking hippies are keeping our poor oil companies from building new refineries (to make gasoline out of all that oil they’re not producing from their federal leases):

Everyone know there hasn’t been a new refinery permitted in the last 30 years.

You know why?

No one has applied for one.

Again, it’s supply and demand, baby: keep the supply in check and you can charge whatever the hell you want, and keep those profit margins fat.

The truth of the matter was explained by no one less than BP’s chief executive: “[refinery] margins over the last 10 to 15 years have not been high enough on average to justify building a new refinery.”

Sure, they’ve applied for expansions to existing facilities – it’s so much easier (and cheaper) to expand the ones grandfathered in under the old environmental and safety rules; building new ones would just cramp the oil companies’ style. And expansion permits aren’t hard to get: it takes about 5-12 months. Contrast that to the two years it took my company to get a permit to build a dry, non-flammable, non-hazardous storage warehouse in Portland.

So, the next time you hear someone blame the environmentalists for high gas prices, ask them why oil company profits are at an all-time high when production costs have stayed flat and production capacity has not been maximized.

Then ask them why in the world they would ever vote Republican.