Another Art-Less, Bold Faced Lie by Sean Hannity Claiming That There's No Oil in the Areas Already Available to the Oil Companies for Drilling

His hero also disliked those pesky facts.

"Facts are stupid things."

Ronald Reagan

Sean Hannity falsely suggested that federal areas legally available for leasing by oil companies contain no oil. In fact, federal agencies have estimated that more oil exists on the tens of millions of acres of federal areas currently legally available for drilling than there is in the areas currently off limits to drilling.

As The Boston Globe noted in a June 20 article, "About 86 billion barrels of additional oil may lie offshore, according to the US government's Energy Information Administration," and then continued: "Of that amount, about 18 billion barrels are subject to the moratorium."

Furthermore, Hannity's assertion that if the moratorium were lifted, "we'd have that oil within two years," is contradicted by the Energy Information Administration, which considered the likely effects of allowing the congressional and executive moratoriums on certain offshore drilling to expire in 2012 and stated: "The projections in the OCS [outer continental shelf] access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030. Leasing would begin no sooner than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017."

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