Is Brian Davis the Hannibal Lecter of serial exaggerators?
ex·ag
ger·a
tor n.
Synonyms: exaggerate, inflate, magnify, overstate
These verbs mean to represent something as being larger or greater than it actually is: exaggerated the size of the fish I caught; inflated his own importance; magnifying her part in their success; overstated his income on the loan application.
--The Free Dictionary
In our now updated post from July 11, Somewhere in Minnesota, Roger Moe is almost laughing, we predicted that the Chinese-Cuba offshore drilling urban legend Davis likes to cite wouldn't be the last of GOP-endorsed candidate's whoppers.
We didn't have long to wait.
Brian Davis has posted an article about himself from the Stewartville Star to his official web site that helps round-out the profile of the GOP's endorsed candidate as a serial exaggerator.
About the engineering career:
Davisearned a bachelor of science degree in nuclear engineering at the University of Illinois and worked for three years as an engineer in the electric power industry.
Sure, Brian, whatever you say. Here's what Brian Davis's Facebook page lists:
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Davis spent more time at the firm in a summer job and as a work study student (see campaign bio) than as an engineer following graduation. What next? Davis backdating his medical career to add a couple more years of being a doctor while attending med school? Then there's the off-limit oil resources inflation in the Stewartville Star article:
Up to 100 billion barrels of oil are available in offshore areas near the United States, and many billion barrels more could be found in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) Davis said.
Another good one, Brian. The casual reader would think that none of those 100 billions barrels can't be touched and the number of barrels locked away in ANWR rivals those under the OCS. That's the implication.
What Davis isn't letting on is that most of
the 100 billion offshore resources are located in areas that are
already open for drilling, and Congressman Walz has been pushing for oil companies to be more aggressive in extracting resources from those open areas.
How far is Davis stretching the truth on this one?
Even the "Drill Here, Drill Now" people at Newt Gingrich's "American Solutions" are modest about the off-limit offshore figure:
U.S. law prohibits the development of approximately 38 billion barrels of undeveloped oil resources (19 billion barrels onshore and 18.92 billion offshore [final emphasis added]).
That leaves over 80 billion barrels located in areas open for drilling, as we've noted before (and the graphic we reproduce below the fold once more demonstrates).
As for ANWR: in May 2008, the Energy Information Agency set the "many billions" within this range:
Cumulative oil production resulting from the opening of ANWR from 2018 through 2030 amounts to 2.6 billion barrels in the mean resource case, 1.9 billion barrels in the low resource case, and 4.3 billion barrels in the high resource case.
"Many billions"? Hardly--more of a textbook example of the weasel word "many" in action. From Wikipedia:
Weasel words are deliberately misleading or ambiguous elements of language used to avoid making a straightforward statement while simultaneously generating the illusion that a direct, clear form communication is being utilized. This type of language is used to deceive, distract, or manipulate an audience. . . .
. . .The vagueness of a statement may disguise the validity or the aim of that statement. Generalizing by means of quantifiers, such as "many" or "better", as well as the passive voice ("it has been decided") conceal the full picture. In this way, one may evade responsibility for what may be inferred. ...
For more of the same wildly stretched spin, see Horse apples from a NRCC sock puppet: another Davis talking point bites it.
Davis looks more and more like a serial exaggerator every time he visits a newspaper editor, writes a column, or possibly even smiles.
From an older post, reproduced here for our readers' convenience. A statement from Walz's communications chief Meredith Salsbery said:
According to the Minerals Management Service [MMS, of all the oil and gas believed to exist on the Outer Continental Shelf, 82% of the natural gas and 79% of the oil is located in areas that are currently open for leasing.
Salsbury noted these documents from the House Natural Resources committee. She also provided this link to MMS information about productive leases. And where did the committee get its information?
Mostly likely this report from the MMS, Report to Congress: Comprehensive Inventory of U.S. OCS Oil and Natural Gas Resources Energy Policy Act of 2005 – Section 357. If I'm reading the report right, if the acreage of the OCS sealed off seems large, those acres aren't holding the vast majority of reserves. Rather, most of the "undiscovered technically recoverable resources" are--as Walz claims--in areas open for explorations and drilling.
The table at right, above, found on p. vii of the MMS report, lists the
total "Undiscovered Resources" for oil at 85.88 billion barrels (bb).
It does not note which of these resources are in OCS area unavailable
for leasing and development (either by congressional moratoria, or in
the case of the Eastern Gulf of Mexico Area, executive order). For that
information, we must look at Table 4 (left), which is found on page 72
(it will be listed at 90/134) in the MMS Inventory.
The table lists 18.92 bb of "Undiscovered Technically Recoverable Resources" of oil.
Rounded up, this is the 19 bb of oil that we hear bantered about in discussions of opening up the OCS. If we're looking at this right--and we're a graduate of the Ozarks Famous Writers School, not the local engineering mill [wow! solar-powered boats]--that means that 66.92 bb of recoverable OCS oil resources are open on publicly available land.
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