Postage Stamp on a Football Field? More Like a Pile of Horsepuckey.

Six Republican Congressional candidates just returned from their western energy tour with Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann as lead mouthpiece. The major newspapers in Colorado apparently didn't bother to report the leg of their visit where they supposedly learned all about oil shale, and Bachmann didn't wow the newspaper in Fairbanks with her newfound knowledge, which was basically the same stuff she was spouting before she left Washington. 

In fact, they were all speaking in remarkable unison the same old comparison, which has been around since at least 2001:

The total footprint for drilling in ANWR would be less than two thousand acres out of almost 20 million acres — the equivalent of a postage stamp on a football field.

I've already questioned the metaphor and its misleading way of adding up scattered areas into one contiguous space this way: If your butt takes a load of birdshot, do you add up the surface area of the pellets or measure the area of the wound?

But I haven't seen anyone drill into that stamp-on-a-football-field image from the perspective of an information design editor. You know, someone who might actually check the math before they draw the picture.

Because it's wrong on that basis, too.

When you visualize a postage stamp on a football field, you're imagining something about an inch square on an expanse of grass that covers 8,289,216 square inches. Pretty darn tiny. Hardly worth thinking about.

But that's not a "GOP Stamp." Can't be, because 2,000 acres divided into the roughly 19 million acres of the entire wildlife reserve gives you 9,500 2,000-acre sections. Therefore, a GOP Stamp is 1/9,500th of the area to which it's being compared.

Measure out 1/9,500th of a football field, and you get a "postage stamp" that's slightly larger than 2 feet by 3 feet, or about the size of a one-yard slab of your kitchen counter. That's enough to bury 872 real postage stamps like the tiny one the drill-in-ANWR propagandists wanted you to visualize.

Next time you hear that postage-stamp-on-a-football-field reassurance, just remember they're understating the amount of acreage affected by a factor of 872. And that's before you even take into account the other ways they're fudging how they count the 2,000 acres.

Bluestem Prairie goes into more detail and the Minnesota Independent wraps up some of the other holes in the larger "oil just waiting to flow into the gas pumps" story.

Kind of makes you wonder what other numbers are being distorted for public consumption, doesn't it?

Comments

[serns]

That's a postER on a football field. Or a little smaller than an MIT balloon. I think there was an Alaska tourism ad that was trying to compare the Exxon Valdez oil spill to Marilyn Monroe's mole, tiny if not endearing.

[John]

Still, no one is talking about using oil efficiently.
Rocky Mountain Institute, an independent organization researching market driven efficient uses of energy, is doing some pretty good stuff.

[bob vance]

You are right about the error that has somehow been spread. I made your calculation, myself, recently.

John Hofmeister, former president of Shell Oil, *correctly* stated that it is:
"about the size of a postage stamp on the front page of the New York times.

Where the football field first came from, I don't know.

However, that stated, it is small footprint.
Even if it is as large as you show in your other article, assuming some inter-connected nexus of roads and power, the area is not a scenic wonderland -- it's a tundra waste land.

Like it or not, we need oil, and not just for transportation.
I say drill now, drill everywhere -- the Russians and Chinese are.
We are the cleanest large country on Earth. Our drilling technology is the most advanced and safest. Would we rather trust Russian or Chinese technology to spare the Earth? I think not. Environmental considerations are not on their list of priorities.

If we are talking future, yes, we should reduce our need for oil for transportation, heat, and power generation.

Of course I'm not "against" alternatives. As far as we know, oil is not being replenished, and even if it were, certainly there is *some* end to fossil carbon.

I would like to see nuclear power developed, as used in France, which would take care of heat and power for the mid term -- 100 years or so, until we have major alternative breakthrough, such as tapping the Earth's core or something.

As for transportation, I don't believe that batteries are ever going to fly our planes, so we will need crude for that for a long time, maybe essentially forever. Perhaps some kind of breakthrough in rocket propellant would make it viable.

As for cars, I'm not well versed in battery or fuel-cell technology. If we can get the same power and distance that we are accustomed to today, that's great -- as long as we have nuclear to charge up those batteries.

I'm skeptical about wind power. It's inconsistent, so we need some way to store it. Perhaps perfect for charging batteries, but I'm wondering about delivery mechanisms.
But, anyway, I hate the way they look -- talk about blight !!
I'd rather have one of those oil rocker pumps than a bunch of windmills.
But, convince me that it will work and that we have vast areas of breezy, uninhabited wasteland to put them in and I'm OK. BTW, it's funny how it's Ok for the people of rural Texas to be for putting up wind farms but it's not OK for Alaskans to be for drilling in Alaska.

Solar is just as ugly as wind, although improvements have been made. However, nano tech breakthroughs seem to proffer real hope in that area, but many years down the road.

I think that biofuels are a joke. But I'm not adamant about it.

I liken burning corn or grass compared to burning oil as similiar to crushing rose petals on your skin compared to using perfume.

Oil has been distilled and concentrated for us for millions of years.
It's simply the best we have.
I love it.
(Don't get me started on global warming.)

BTW, I have a B.S. in geophysics from Caltech, '70, if you're wondering what kind of loon I am.

bv