There are times when it’s all I can do to keep from screaming at my computer screen. Today, thanks to the rampant idiocy of the “let’s suspend the gasoline tax” crowd and this gem from the President of Shell Oil has been a particularly vigorous stress test of my will power.

Shell Oil president: To cut price, produce more gasoline in U.S.:

John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Co., the U.S. division of Royal Dutch Shell, addressed rising gasoline prices during an interview Wednesday with John Roberts on CNN’s “American Morning.”

ROBERTS: The president is advocating more drilling on U.S. territory. Isn’t it true that globally we’re starting to reach a peak in production and that within maybe a decade or two oil production will begin to decrease?

HOFMEISTER: Well, I think there is some argument [that] with convenient, easy oil we will peak sometime in the next decade. I think Shell sees that coming, but in terms of total oil supply to the world, we’re a long way from reaching peak oil because it doesn’t take into account unconventional oil.

I think the president brings up a good point in that we could, we have the available domestic supplies off the coast of Alaska as well as [the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge]. Shell has won $2 billion worth of high bids for the Chukchi Sea — that’s a few years off before we could begin production.

But let’s remember there’s more than 100 billion barrels of untouched oil and gas in this country that is subject to a 30-year moratorium. Now, there’s only one body in this country that can set a 30-year moratorium, and that’s the U.S. government.

I think you can see why I flirted with projectile cranium detachment syndrome (hereafter PCDS) and/or vascular geyserhood over this one. In case it’s not insultingly clear to you regular readers, and for the sake of the newbies I see out there in today’s audience, let me run through the details:

• The interviewer, John Roberts, gets bonus points for bringing up the issue of peak oil at all. When this happens on an outlet as mainstream as CNN, we’re making progress in the oil infowar. I do wish he would have followed up just a bit, but getting the people on CNN, MSNBC, etc. to do that is the next hill to climb, I suppose.
• The biggest single sin here is, of course, lumping the vast unconventional oil reserves in with easy oil. Oil in the ground (or the shale or the rocks or miles below the surface of an ocean) is not the same as conventional (and conveniently placed) oil. As I so often point out, if you found an oil reserve with one trillion barrels of extremely high quality oil, but no matter how much you spent on infrastructure you couldn’t extract it faster than a paltry rate of a couple of million barrels of oil per day, it would do absolutely nothing to change our peak oil situation. We don’t consume a stockpile of oil in the ground, we consume a stream of oil extracted from that stockpile.
• The ruse of “let us drill in ANWR, please!” is really getting old. As Joe Romm pointed out just today, Bush’s own administration found that drilling ANWR would reduce the price of gasoline by a whopping one cent per gallon–in 2025.
• 100 billion barrels of oil and gas? Really? And how much of that is verified to exist and is technically recoverable and can be extracted in what time frame and at what cost? [crickets noise]

Excuse me, I have to go to my happy place for a while before I read much more energy and environmental news.