As a responsible and intrepid academic researcher, it was my duty to make a trip to www.newt.org to find out how to lower the price of gas to $2.50 a gallon, despite the risk of exposure to political rhetoric. On the front webpage there is a very large box to press that advertises $2.50 a gallon gas. So I ventured to press it, and found that it brought up a donation page, instead of showing what the policy was. I backtracked and ventured further and finally found their energy policy. Surprisingly, the policy sounded much like that of the current administration, promising to develop all forms of energy, although not mentioning solar or geothermal by name, which is where we get most of our renewable energy at SC Edison. It did promise to abolish the EPA, but then to replace it by the ESA, the Energy Solutions Administration, however. Disappointingly, it didn’t even mention the promise of $2.50 a gallon gas or show where that calculation came from.
The energy page did claim that in shale oil we had more than triple the oil of Saudi Arabia. I had never heard the claim that we had more than 200 billion barrels there. However, watching Kudrow on CNBC this morning, he claimed that we had 1,500 billion barrels in North America, which is larger than the entire worlds’ known reserves. When he claimed, as does Gingrich, that the US should allow developing it on federal lands, it was pointed out that 90% of it is on private land. Companies have been producing oil from the Bakken shale in Montana for a while and are up to almost a half million barrels a day. The problem is capacity to transport or pipeline oil from there.
As I pointed out in the article on “Why Does Gas Cost So Much”, in 2011 we exported as much oil as Gingrich says we would develop, about 2.3 million barrels a day. I also pointed out that oil companies would be making about a dollar a gallon less than they are now, and losing money on it. That would be a rude shock to shareholders, many of whom are in Newt’s party.
