I have no idea why Democrats are letting themselves get painted into a corner over their stand on offshore drilling and ANWR. It's such an easy charge to squelch, they can even reduce it to a soundbite. If more production will lower oil prices, why are the oil companies so anxious to drill?
Here's the math: America has about 3% of the world's proven reserves;It consumes 25% of the world's oil. Recovery of proven reserves in ANWR or offshore won't do anything to appreciably change either of those numbers. Add to the above the fact that there is only one price for oil. There is not a domestic price and an international price, only a world price.
Given those numbers, how does the price of oil and gasoline go down? Well, I suppose all the oil companies can get together and promise to sell domestically produced oil at a much lower price to America. Everybody who thinks that will happen, please go back to Drudge's page.
The truth is that every single barrel of oil owned by every oil company carries the same price tag. If oil companies think that drilling in ANWR or offshore will bring down the world price, why on earth would they do that? It will make every oil asset they have shrink in value. It will hurt their revenues and their shareholders and drive their market capitalization way down. In their Adam Smith world doing something that will bring oil prices down would be idiocy.
I'd like to see some Democrat, preferably THE Democrat of the moment, get in front of a camera in answer to an oil groupie and say something like this to the American people:
"Who believes the oil companies are trying to do us a favor by lowering the price of oil? Who remembers any time in the past when they have done us such a favor? Why are they so anxious to drill in ANWR and off the coast of Florida when they haven't touched 68 million acres for which leases have already been granted and drilling approved? Do you really trust Exxon to bring the price of oil down?"
I'm sure Obama would say it better, but I want to know why nobody at all is saying it.