Political Quotes

“Mr. President, you hear a lot of talk about the trouble in the Middle East, and people are saying that oil prices are going up and, therefore, the pain at the gas pump is being felt because there is this shakiness in the oil markets. You hear the commentary: Well, we ought to be solving this problem by drilling more in the United States. In essence what people are talking about is they want to drill more in the Gulf of Mexico. Of course, there is plenty of opportunity to drill in the Gulf of Mexico. There are 30 million acres that are already under lease that have not been drilled. There are 7 million acres that are being drilled under lease, but there are an additional 30 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico under lease, so there is plenty of opportunity. There is a lot more opportunity for domestic drilling. But what I want to talk about today is, it is this simplified message that if we drill more domestically--which we clearly have the capacity to--that is going to solve the problem. That is not the problem, and that is not the reason for why the gas prices are going up as they are. I will grant you that whenever there is an oil-producing region of the world where there is a disruption, then that does have some effect on the price of oil. But what we have seen is an extraordinary spike in the last couple of months in the price of oil.…”