America Has Huge Recoverable Oil Reserves

But if it's on Federal land it might as well be in China:

The Green River Formation, a largely vacant area of mostly federal land that covers the territory where Colorado, Utah and Wyoming come together, contains about as much recoverable oil as all the rest the world’s proven reserves combined, an auditor from the Government Accountability Office told Congress on Thursday. …

“The Green River Formation — an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming — contains the world’s largest deposits of oil shale,” Anu K. Mittal, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment said in written testimony submitted to the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and Environment.

“USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions,” Mittal testified. …

“As you can imagine having the technology to develop this vast energy resource will lead to a number of important socioeconomic benefits including the creation of jobs, increases in wealth and increases in tax and royalty payments for federal and state governments,” she said.

Meanwhile, the huge Solyndra facility is up for sale in Fremont, CA, and numerous other "green" energy firms have gone bust despite millions in federal dollars. Can you imagine the boost in economic activity that would occur if we opened this land for exploration? Oil prices would fall, unemployment would fall, jobs would soar.

But we can't have that, can we Barack?