Submitted by CARPE DIEM

“I want you to think about this,” Barack Obama said in Las Vegas last week. “The oil companies have already been given 68 million acres of federal land, both onshore and offshore, to drill. They’re allowed to drill it, and yet they haven’t touched it – 68 million acres that have the potential to nearly double America’s total oil production.”

Wow, how come the oil companies didn’t think of that?

(MP: Especially now that oil is $142 per barrel!)

Perhaps because the notion is obviously false – at least to anyone who knows how oil and gas exploration actually works.

As a public service, the WSJ provides some remedial education about “idle leases.”

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