Lefty Hatred: No Math Required

I draw your attention to this post over at Powerline which deconstructs an attack on the left's ultimate hobgoblin, the Koch brothers, using math an common sense.  It's pretty funny.  When I saw the punch line, that the Koch would only need to process 8 billion barrels of oil, I knew at a glance how laughable this was.  You mean, if Koch Industries was somehow 10 times bigger than Exxon...? 

It's too funny, and PL captures it all nicely...

From here on, it is just arithmetic: 830,000 barrels per day equals 303,000,000 barrels per year. If Koch gets 1/18 of that capacity, it is 16.8 million barrels per year. IFG says Koch *only* needs to sell eight billion barrels to break even on the $120 billion it will lose (over 50 years) because of the pipeline. So how long will it take Koch to break even? Eight billion divided by 16.8 million = 476 years. Yup! In a mere 476 years, Koch will break even on the Keystone pipeline!

And that assumes IFG’s facts are correct. In fact, to the best of my knowledge Koch produces no, or virtually no, oil in Alberta.

So what is going on here? Rich liberals hire kids–recent college graduates, or maybe college or high school students–to produce idiotic “research reports” that can be dismantled by anyone familiar with arithmetic, let alone the oil and gas industry, of which these kids obviously know nothing at all. The claims these reports make are completely divorced from reality, but liberals don’t seem to care. The Huffington Post headlines: “Keystone XL Pipeline Could Yield $100 Billion For Koch Brothers.” PolicyMic: “Actually, You Probably WILL Guess Who Stands to Make $100 Billion Off the Keystone XL Pipeline.” TruthDig: “Koch Brothers Stand to Make $100 Billion From Keystone Pipeline.” And, of course, the Kos Kidz are all over it.