Don't you love headlines?

This one at CNN reads "Administration Rips Democrats' Bill as Waste of Time". It could just as easily have read: "Dems to GOP: Thanks But No Thanks on Drilling our Heads into the Sand".

It remains to be seen if the bill passed by the Senate, which does allow drilling 50 miles off shore if adjacent states agree and 100 miles off shore whether they do or not, and includes a repeal of some tax breaks for oil companies and incentives for renewables, will make it out of the Congress. Either way, it is a bill that leaves some Dems feeling that it is too permissive, and some Republicans feeling that it is too restrictive.

The irony though, is that the NY Times quotes Representative Nick J. Rahall II, the West Virginia Democrat who leads the Natural Resources Committee, as saying “We are opening up to 400 million acres off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to drilling and expanding the availability of oil by at least 2 billion barrels, and we have done so in a balanced, reasonable and responsible manner.”

Responsible or not, 2 billion barrels, most of which won't come on line for many years to come, represents about a 3 week supply of oil. Yup. According to both Chevron and The Oxford Princeton Programme it took us 125 years to use the first trillion barrels of oil, and will take us about 30 years to use the next trillion.

Here's some quick math:

1,000,000,000,000 barrels 
___________________________ =       approx. 91,000,000 barrels/day

30 X 365 days 

At a rate of 91 Million barrels, give or take, a day, we'll burn through 2 billion barrels in just about 21 days.

Whether drilling here and drilling now makes sense if we've got it is completely beside the point. Whatever we get from those sites will take years to come on line and won't create anywhere near the impact on the demand market to significantly impact prices at the pump or elsewhere. Waste of time indeed.