Thoughts to think by the gas pump...

The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management today published proposed regulations to establish a commercial oil shale program that could result in the addition of up to 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from lands in the western United States....

...The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is only publishing proposed regulations at this time because the Consolidated Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2008 prohibits the agency from using FY2008 funds to prepare or publish final regulations. The President has called on Congress to remove the ban on finalizing oil shale program regulations...

...The largest known deposits of oil shale are located in a 16,000-square mile area in the Green River formation in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. Shale formations in that area hold the equivalent of up to 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Federal lands comprise 72 percent of the total surface of oil shale acreage in the Green River formation....

That is to say, in plain English, that Democrats are blocking the extraction of petroleum in the US. How much petroleum? 800 billion barrels...what does number that mean? Hmmm? Well children, the human race has used, to date, about 1 trillion barrels of oil. So the Green River Formation, by itself, is equal to about 80% of all the oil we've ever used on earth. Arabia ain't in it!