Back in April, I wrote an article entitled, Bob McDonnell Cites Study By Global Warming "Skeptic". As it turns out, the author of the study, the Thomas Jefferson Institute's David Schnare runs a blog where he has some...uh, interesting things to say. For instance, Schnare says that environmental activists are "very sick people" who "quietly rejoice over the potential of millions (billions?) of starving people." He jokes about and belittles global warming, commenting that "the Scandinavian moose emits 2,100 kg of methane a year" and that "Thank goodness hunters shoot 35,000 of them each year." Hahahaha, hilarious!More substantively, Schnare claims that "reserves off the Virginia coast may likely be 900 billion barrels," which is almost equivalent to the entire world's proven crude oil reserves. Let me repeat: this report claims that we may have the equivalent of the ENTIRE WORLD'S OIL RESERVES off the Virginia coast. Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo. (the report also claims that this oil "would supply Virginia’s needs for more than 4,000 years.") In fact, Schnare's report itself cites a Federal estimate of just 130 million barrels of oil, or 1/6,000th of the 900 billion barrels claimed in the "study." That's enough to "supply Virginia’s needs for [just] 7.5 months," not 4,000 years. Close! :)
Anyway, the reason I'm talking about Schnare again is that he's baaaack, this time being "interviewed" (if you can even call it that) by a flack from America's fine oil and gas industry, the American Petroleum Institute. Click here to listen, as Schnare repeats many of the same howlers that he writes in his "study" (the one that Bob McDonnell cites) and adds a number of additional ones. For instance, Schnare claims in the interview that the United States imports 11 BILLION barrels of oil per day, when the actual number is 11 MILLION barrels of oil per day (one-thousandth of what Schnare says). Schnare further claims that the U.S. Gulf Coast contains 45 billion barrels in oil reserves, when in fact the entire United States only has 21 billion barrels in proven reserves, with the Gulf Coast containing less than half of that. Again, not even close.
Schnare uses all kinds of bizarre mathematical and statistical assumptions to determine that there are tens of billions of barrels of oil and 900 years of natural gas reserves off Virginia's coast. He claims that 600,000 barrels per day of U.S. oil imports come from OPEC, when the actual number (according to EIA) is 6 million barrels per day. Yet again, not even close.
Aside from Schnare's wacky numbers, he makes some other questionable claims as well. For example, Schnare says that offshore oil production "It hasn’t affected the tourism in Texas and Louisiana." He claims that "my colleagues are fisherman and they say there will be more fish around oil rigs." Then there's my personal favorite: "We’re deeply concerned about the environment as you might imagine from the name, Center for Environmental Stewardship." Pardon me while I snort milk up my nose.
By the way, is this THE worst, most sycophantic interviewer in human history? Barf.
h/t to Bearing Drift on this one
