We here in the United States keep electing fools who won’t let us drill on our own soil.

In 2005, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, requiring the Department of Interior to inventory the oil resources that could be found both onshore and offshore in U.S. territory. In February 2006, Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) published the report on offshore oil resources on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). It determined there were 85.9 billion barrels of “undiscovered technically recoverable” oil sitting off our beaches.

Just this offshore portion of our undiscovered oil is more than all the proven oil in Venezuela, and more than all the proven oil in Russia, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain combined.

Our country runs on oil and when the price of crude soars, the price of everything else does as well. Jobs are lost and we are set into an economic spiral.

The U.S. government knows where it can get its hands on more untapped petroleum than exists in the proven reserves of Iran or Iraq, which have 136 billion barrels and 115 billion barrels, respectively.

This unexploited stock of crude is greater than what the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports is in the proven reserves of Russia (60 billion barrels), Libya (41.5 billion barrels) and Nigeria (36.2 billion barrels) combined.

It is more than Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela has (80 billion barrels). It is more than is now known to sit beneath the waters and sands of Kuwait (101.5 billion barrels) or the United Arab Emirates (97.6 billion barrels).

Bureau of Land Management: The nation’s undiscovered oil resources total about 139 billion barrels.

We need to tell Congress that the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act and National Historic Preservation Act -among others- should not preclude drilling. They talk so much of “ending our dependence on foreign oil” in reference to new, cleaner, technologies… we could end that dependence NOW!