RUSH: Obama, ladies and gentlemen, is “lobbying Democratic senators to oppose” to oppose the Keystone pipeline on Capitol Hill. Obama really did say yesterday that oil is an energy of the past. Oil is a thing of the past. Oil is yesterday’s news. And it’s strikingly bogus! Oil is all we’ve got, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Oil is great. Oil has allowed so much mobility and freedom and prosperity. It has expanded, increased lifestyles. It has expanded life expectancy. The benefits from oil are huge. It’s organic, it’s natural, it’s every bit as part of the earth as anything else that’s part of the earth is. Yet it’s portrayed as a poison, something that’s destroying the planet and so forth, and all of that is lies.

Now, this is simply a guy, Obama, who’s still living in his idealistic youth in college when you have people in the faculty lounge and in the classroom living in utopia in their minds, speculating about how perfect life could be. They drum up and create all of these villains and all of these enemies, all of these demons that are getting in the way. And there is this romantic attachment to something called “green energy,” which doesn’t exist. There is no energy earn oil that will get an airplane off the ground that can take anybody anywhere or cargo anywhere. There isn’t. And none of the green energy that’s being talked about now will do that.

There’s no solar energy that will fly an airplane. There’s no wind energy that will launch an airplane. Not anything that you’d want to get on, and not anything you’d put a family member on, and not anything you would want to put cargo in. Sure, there are gliders, but you get my drift. There’s nothing. Oil is it! It’s nothing that’s antiquated or in the past. It is the fuel of the engine of freedom. It’s exactly what it is. And the free flow of oil at market prices is crucial to the economic expansion and growth of this economy and people’s opportunity for prosperity along with it. And this opposition to it is absurd. It’s demented. Every green energy area that Obama has looked into has failed. It is corrupt.

And the money that he has given it, federal tax dollars, much of it comes back to him in the form of campaign donations. There are countless Solyndras, countless other solar and wind energy companies that don’t exist and are going belly up. There’s no business there! We simply haven’t mastered it yet. Oil is what it is because the market works. Yesterday, I played a sound bite of President Obama. Typical left-wing sound bite. We’ve been hearing it for all my life. We’re only 2% of the population; we use 20% of the world’s oil. That makes us just rotten to the core! How mean and evil! We are thieves who are running around stealing all these resources from the rest of the world, putting to use for ourselves. It’s not fair, and we have to be cut down to size.

This 2%-oil-reserves business is a misleading statistic. Gerri Willis on her blog (she’s at Fox Business): “Gas prices shot up 18 cents on average nationwide over the past two weeks, according to the latest Lundberg survey. That puts the average cost of regular gas at $3.69 a gallon. Of course, many of you around the country are already paying over $4. President Obama, members of his administration, Democrats in Congress, and his allies on the left all make the same case: we can’t ‘drill our way’ out of this problem,” which they’ve been saying for 30 years. What if we had been drilling for 30 years? We’d be out of the problem. “They say we use a quarter of the world’s oil, but only have 2% of the world’s oil reserves. So, do the math. They say it’s impossible, but here’s how he gets to that mythical 2%.

“For simplicity, we’ll call it Obama’s big oil lie because that’s what it is. They’re only counting proven oil reserves. The truth is that 2% oil reserves figure is whatever the government says it is. HereÂ’s the official definition from the non-partisan Congressional Research service. Proven reserves are: ‘certainty to be recoverable in future years from known reservoirs under existing economic and operating conditions.’ The key word there is ‘existing’ conditions. The US has around 20 billion barrels in proven reserves, but the amount of undiscovered so-called ‘technically recoverable’ oil is over seven times that. Those are the government’s own figures!”

Meaning it’s there. It’s “technically recoverable,” which means it’s there. It’s “technically recoverable.” It’s undiscovered meaning we don’t have it in our hands, but we know it’s there. “And we can get that oil using today’s technology. In fact, the US has nearly 1.5 trillion barrels of oil,” says Gerri Willis,” not 20 billion, 1.5 trillion. Let me put it in a way that everybody can understand this: 1.5 trillion barrels of oil is “enough to fuel the present needs in the US for around 250 years,” and that’s just oil in the United States. We are not running out.

The supply may be infinite, but we’re nowhere near its end. There is enough oil in this country to run this country at current levels of usage for around 250 years, and the regime wants you to believe we’ve only got 20 billion barrels; we’re gonna run out here in ten years or so. That’s outrageous. “Former President of Shell Oil on FBN earlier today on how we could easily get back to producing 10 million barrels a day: ‘The best source for new oil is the world’s largest consumer economy: this country. We could go back to 10 million barrels if we had the permitting that would enable it to happen. We have the oil. There is more oil in this country that we’re not allowed to get at than oil we’re allowed to get at.’

“Much of the oil is off-limits thanks to the policies of this President: The outer Continental shelf.” Off-limits. “The Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in Anwar.” Off-limits. “Shale Oil where the United States has the largest deposits in the world estimated by the government to be over 2 trillion barrels.” Off-limits. “Even when the production is not in this country, the President will do anything he can to stop it, like blocking the Keystone pipeline. Also, what the President is refusing to acknowledge is the United States is in the middle of an oil boom thanks to new technology like deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. So the President needs to stop with the 2% lie. The solutions are right in front of us, but this administration flatly refuses to explore them.”

Now, there can be only one reason. If you know that there is nothing that will power an airplane, if you know that we don’t have the energy to power automobiles the way they are powered now, I mean not even close, and yet you insist on it, what are you insisting on? You are insisting on arresting the growth of this economy. You are insisting on the end of the opportunity for prosperity in this country. You are insisting on taking this country backwards technologically by tens of hundreds of years. This is not idealism run amok. This is not willful utopianism. There’s a reason this is being done. There’s a reason why this country’s being penalized. There’s a reason why this president wants to punish this country. For some reason he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like it the way it was founded. He doesn’t like it the way it’s been operating since it was founded. It’s time we found out what it’s been like to live in the rest of the world because of how mean this country’s been to other people. That’s what’s at stake here; that’s what’s going on.