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?
