Stan Geiger

Al Gore: Bending the Truth

Ya gotta love Al “Global Warming” Gore. After all, nobody this side of Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden and Barack Obama feels your pain more than Al feels it. And nobody works harder to condemn the burning of the fossil fuels that threaten to destroy our planet. Nobody. He cares so much he made the effort to travel to Denver for the opportunity to address the Democratic convention. He cares so much he thinks we should all turn off our air conditioners and ride bicycles. What a guy.

He talks the talk, but somehow I doubt he walks the walk. I have this vision of Al flying to Denver on his fossil-fuel-burning private jet. Upon arriving, he no doubt hopped in his fossil-fuel-burning chauffeur-driven limo and headed off to the festivities where he partook of caviar and French champagne---both of which had to be imported on fossil-fuel-burning ships.

I remember hearing a story some years ago that said Al was holding a good-sized chunk of Occidental Petroleum stock. Al has made a butt-load of money since those days, money that he has invested. Given the reports about oil company profits, it isn’t hard to imagine Al is heavily invested---directly or indirectly---in the very energy companies against which he rails.

But let’s put Al’s hypocrisy aside and focus on something he had to say to the convention.

At some point in his speech, Al said the U.S. government is borrowing money from China and using it to buy oil from Persian Gulf nations. That was a silly statement.

Now I’m sure the federal government buys some fuel. Certainly the military buys some fuel. But when you cut to the chase, it’s not the government that’s consuming all that imported oil it’s we the people. We are consuming it, and we are paying for it.

Uncle Sam isn’t borrowing money from China to buy oil from Arabs; Uncle Sam is borrowing money from China to keep the government afloat. He’s borrowing from China to pay the bills. He’s borrowing from China to make payroll, to pay for highways, to pay for pork and to pay for social programs. And worst of all, he's borrowing from China to pay well over $200 billion a year in interest on past debt.

Beyond that, Al’s comment vastly overstated our reliance on oil from Persian Gulf nations.

I went to the website for the Energy Information Administration. I clicked on “U.S. Crude Oil Imports from OPEC” and found much interesting information.

An itemized list of how much oil we imported in 2007, and from where it came, is offered by the site. According to my count, there were 119 countries on the list. Of those, only 13 belong to OPEC, and only 7 are Persian Gulf nations (one of the Persian Gulf nations being Bahrain, which is not an OPEC member.) We are quite diversified in our importation of oil; we are not overwhelmingly reliant on the Persian Gulf.

That’s not to say getting cut off from Persian Gulf oil wouldn’t cause us any problems---like extremely high gasoline prices, for example. But we could survive without it until necessary adjustments were made.

As a point of interest, I found a lot of names on our list of suppliers that, quite frankly, shocked me.

We imported 414,000 barrels a day from Russia. We imported 31,000 barrels a day from Vietnam. We imported 53,000 barrels a day from Spain. We imported 123,000 barrels a day from South Korea. We imported 55,000 barrels a day from Italy. We imported 35,000 barrels a day from Japan. And we imported 277,000 barrels a day from the United Kingdom.

If you add up all of the above, it comes to a hair under a million barrels per day.

I’ve always known Russia had a lot of oil reserves. Still, I was surprised to learn they send so much of it to us. As far as the rest of the crew goes, I wasn’t aware any of them had oil reserves at all let alone enough to allow them to export.

In 2007, the U.S. imported an average of 13,468,000 barrels of crude per day. Of that, 2,115,000 barrels---15.7 percent---came from Persian Gulf nations. And 70 percent of that came from one country: Saudi Arabia.

U.S. domestic production was 5,064,000 barrels per day---more than twice what we imported from the Persian Gulf.

Our biggest foreign supplier was Canada. We imported 2,455,000 barrels per day---more than we imported from all Persian Gulf nations combined---from our neighbor to the north. Canada and Mexico combined accounted for 3,987,000 barrels per day---29.6 percent of the total, and nearly twice as much as we bought from Persian Gulf nations.

At best, Al didn’t do his homework before he shot off his mouth. At worst, he deliberately peddled a big fat distortion to the American people for political purposes.

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