Republican John McCain on Wednesday credited the recent $10-a-barrel drop in the price of oil to President Bush's lifting of a presidential ban on offshore drilling, an action he has been advocating in his presidential campaign.
Bush recently lifted the executive order banning offshore drilling that his father put in place in 1990. He also asked Congress to lift its own moratorium on oil exploration on the outer continental shelf which includes coastal waters as close as three miles from shore.
"The price of oil dropped $10 a barrel," said McCain, who argued that the psychology of lifting the ban has affected world markets.
Even the White House, usually so quick to spread The Big Lie, wouldn't bite.
The White House didn't go that far. Presidential spokeswoman Dana Perino said the price drop also could reflect diminished demand.
"I don't know if we fully deserve the credit," Perino said.
"We don't predict what happens in the market," she said. "We can't really tell. Certainly, taking that action would send a signal that at least the executive branch is serious about moving forward and increasing the supply we have in America."
Truth is, 75% of offshore reserves are open to drilling now, even though McCain and Bush want you to believe that Obama and the Democrats are stopping new domestic exploration and production.
Most of the country's estimated offshore reserves - about 75 percent - lie in areas that have been drilled for years or are being opened for exploration. Roughly 48 percent of the nation's estimated reserves, or 41 billion barrels, lie beneath the western and central Gulf of Mexico, where oil companies armed with new drilling technology are pushing into ever deeper water. Another 27 percent of the estimated reserves, or 23.6 billion barrels, are believed to lie off the north coast of Alaska, where the federal government sold oil exploration leases this spring, despite fears that the work would hurt the polar bear population.
So, are the oil companies using all those big profits to drill in areas already open to them? Of course not. That's too expensive. Much easier to make money in the stock market.
The companies insist they're trying to find new oil that might help bring down gas prices, but the money they spend on exploration is nothing compared with what they spend on stock buybacks and dividends.
It's good news for shareholders, including mutual funds and retirement plans for millions of Americans, but no help to drivers already making drastic cutbacks to offset the high cost of fuel.
The five biggest international oil companies plowed about 55 percent of the cash they made from their businesses into stock buybacks and dividends last year, up from 30 percent in 2000 and just 1 percent in 1993, according to Rice University's James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.
The percentage they spend to find new deposits of fossil fuels has remained flat for years, in the mid-single digits.
Go read the article to find out why the oil companies don't want to risk the money on new projects - "the easy oil is gone". They have shareholders to think about. So, even if you lifted all the bans on all the drilling tomorrow, there is no guarantee that you would get any oil, if you did, it would be well over a decade away, and "opening the coasts to offshore drilling would have no significant impact on oil prices before 2030". And that's according to the US Dept. of Energy. The Facts aren't stopping McCain and the Republicans from spreading the The Big Lie.
What is really disturbing is that we are falling back into this familiar pattern that we see every election: Republicans lie, Democrats run around refuting it, by that time it has lodged in the public consciousness, and the Republicans simply move on to the next lie.
Haven't we seen this movie before?