Whenever I hear those comments about how much oil we have, I have to chuckle. They always base it on known reserves. The problem is, we haven't been able to drill in so much of the US they have not done exploration for quite some time. So of course our reserves appear small, if you don't explore and use up the reserves you can drill, they fall to a very small amount.
If we explored on the shelf and in the US, we may have a lot more than 3% of reserves.
I wrote on a related topic, "peak oil" here:
http://andrews.blogtownhall.com/2008/08/19/rejecting_peak_o il.thtmlThe Dems seem enamored of such foolish arguments, as they are useful to get really bad policies enacted.