Speaking of "meaning" in the political context, a recent email exchange with a friend reminded me of one of my pet peeves: the inability to intelligently discuss issues when the underlying facts -- and I mean basic data -- are hopelessly politicized. This isn't the first time I've written about the problem. In an earlier post I noted the difficulty of a seemingly simple question: How many illegal aliens are there?

Well, this time it's How much oil do we have?

This is no idle question, for it influences policy positions, and it is dictated not by facts, but by political dogma.

How much oil do we have? lies at the heart of the political war between those concerned that we don't have enough, and those who think we shouldn't have any. Barack Obama, for example, finds himself in the position of being unable to advocate drilling for more oil, as Roger L. Simon explained:

He's not even able to advocate something as apparent to the American public as the necessity of off-shore oil drilling, when the Chinese and the Cubans are about to drill in those same waters off America's shores.

What I don't hear discussed very often is the steep drop in domestic oil production over the years:

"U.S. oil output, which peaked at 9.6 million barrels a day in 1970, dropped to 5.4 million barrels a day in 2004--a fall of 44 percent."

For some reason, the debate nearly always centers on the "pristine" ANWR and on offshore drilling. I get the impression that politicians on both sides don't want ordinary citizens to know that this country has more untapped oil than the Saudis.

A lot more:

The largest known oil shale deposits in the world are in the Green River Formation, which covers portions of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Estimates of the oil resource in place within the Green River Formation range from 1.5 to 1.8 trillion barrels. Not all resources in place are recoverable. For potentially recoverable oil shale resources, we roughly derive an upper bound of 1.1 trillion barrels of oil and a lower bound of about 500 billion barrels. For policy planning purposes, it is enough to know that any amount in this range is very high. For example, the midpoint in our estimate range, 800 billion barrels, is more than triple the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. Present U.S. demand for petroleum products is about 20 million barrels per day. If oil shale could be used to meet a quarter of that demand, 800 billion barrels of recoverable resources would last for more than 400 years.

I don't like dependence on oil, but I also don't the fact that people are being lied to, and right now, your average idiot thinks American oil is insignificant, and about to run out.

This is not to say that it won't run out. With 1.1 trillion barrels, even assuming our current consumption rate of 20 million barrels a day were to remain completely unchanged (with zero technological improvements), I would not live to see it run out. Nor would any of this blog's readers. At a rate of 7.3 billion barrels a year, it would run out in 150 years, though. People that far in future will probably look at petroleum the way we look at whale oil.

Anyway, in answer to the question "how much oil do we have?" I'm afraid the answer is that there is no answer.

There are no facts on which to rely. Only opinions. What matters is not so much how much oil we have, so much as how much oil we "should" have. And how much we should be allowed to have.

Facts are subordinated to shoulds.