O'Reilly & Varney Speculate About Oil Prices
By: Steve - March 8, 2011 - 9:30am

Before I show you what O'Reilly and Varney said, think about this, O'Reilly said he does not speculate, and that he does not allow any speculation on his show. Then O'Reilly and Varney speculated that President Obama is conspiring to keep oil prices high.

They have no evidence that any of that is true, and they did not provide any evidence, so it's 100% pure speculation, breaking O'Reilly's own rules.



On top of the speculation Stuart Varney was making some crazy statements. At one point in the segment Varney said this: "We don't have a supply problem."

Then a few minutes later the lunatic said this: "we need to increase supply to get prices lower."

Which makes no sense, if there is not a supply problem, how will increasing the supply get prices lower, it's crazy talk. And of course O'Reilly just let him spin out that right-wing nonsense.

They even both called for drilling in ANWR, and anywhere else we have oil. Which also makes no sense and we have been through all this before.

Experts have said that expanding domestic production of fossil fuels would not shield the U.S. from volatility in the global price of oil. The DOE also agrees that domestic off-shore drilling will not affect Oil and gas prices.

Even the expert at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute said it will not lower oil and gas prices. Ken Green from AEI wrote this on 1-14-11:
If gas prices keep increasing, Republicans probably will make a push on increased fossil fuel production, said Ken Green, resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute think tank.

Crude oil is a global commodity.

"The world price is the world price," Green said. "Even if we were producing 100 percent of our oil," he said, if prices increase because of a shortage in China or India, "our price would go up to the same thing.

"We probably couldn't produce enough to affect the world price of oil," Green added. "People don't understand that."
Other experts said this:
U.S. production could be negated by decisions that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries makes, said Philip Verleger Jr., energy economist, and David Mitchell EnCana, professor of management, at the University of Calgary's business school.

"Suppose the U.S. were to boost production 1 million barrels a day," Verleger said. "OPEC has the capacity to cut 1 million barrels."
From PolitiFact's evaluation of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's statement that a 5 percent increase in domestic production would increase the world supply by less than 1 percent and do almost nothing to our dependence on foreign oil.

This would also have virtually no effect on the price of gas at the pump:
For starters, the lead time for oil exploration takes years. Even if offshore drilling areas opened up tomorrow, experts say it would take at least 10 years to realize any significant production. And even then, they say, the U.S. contribution to the overall global oil market would not be enough to make a significant dent in the price of gas.

"Drilling offshore to lower oil prices is like walking an extra 20 feet per day to lose weight," said David Sandalow, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of Freedom from Oil. "It's just not going to make much difference."

We ran Wasserman Schultz's claim by Jamie Webster, a senior consultant with PFC Energy, which tracks oil production and demand globally and whose clients are governments, including the United States, and oil and gas companies.

We also heard from Daniel J. Weiss, who has written extensively about oil prices and policy and is a senior fellow and director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress. Both Webster and Weiss agreed with Wasserman Schultz.

Wasserman Schultz's math adds up -- Gulf drilling does indeed represent about 5 percent of current domestic production, and a 5 percent increase would barely register in terms of the world supply.

And the experts we found for this Truth-O-Meter as well as ones cited in the past about McCain's claim agree that expanding drilling now would have little effect at the pump any time soon. We rate this claim True.
And btw folks, O'Reilly and Varney also said the government makes more money the higher gas prices go, when that is a lie. Because the federal government makes 18.4 cents a gallon, so it's a fixed rate not a percentage. And in fact, the government actually loses money when gas prices get close to $4.00 a gallon, because people drive less. So O'Reilly and Varney were dead wrong.

Which proves beyond a doubt that Bill O'Reilly and Stuart Varney are nothing but lying, speculating, right-wing spin doctors.

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