American Future Fund’s first nationwide ad contains falsehoods

The American Future Fund, an Iowa-based conservative group that has run advocacy ads for Republicans in competitive congressional races around the country, has produced its first national television advertisement, focusing on energy policy and advocating for more domestic oil exploration.

But the ad, which aired for the first time Wednesday night during Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” relies on outdated, untrue claims.

The ad claims that “the U.S. actually has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia,” but the Energy Information Administration, the statistics branch of the U.S. Department of Energy, reported last year that the United States has 2 percent of the world’s oil, or 22 billion to 30 billion barrels. Saudi Arabia has between 250 billion and 270 billion barrels of oil, or roughly 20 percent of the world’s supply.

The ad goes on to say that “Congress has put up to 85 percent of these resources off-limits.” But the San Francisco Chronicle reported in July that most of the country’s estimated offshore reserves — about 75 percent — lie in areas that have been drilled for years or are being opened for exploration.

From the Chronicle:

“Roughly 48 percent of the nation’s estimated reserves, or 41 billion barrels, lie beneath the western and central Gulf of Mexico, where oil companies armed with new drilling technology are pushing into ever deeper water. Another 27 percent of the estimated reserves, or 23.6 billion barrels, are believed to lie off the north coast of Alaska, where the federal government sold oil exploration leases this spring, despite fears that the work would hurt the polar bear population.”

The ad also asserts the idea that Cuba is preparing to drill off the Florida coast, an urban legend that has been debunked time and time again since it was first uttered in 2006. Jorge Pinon, a senior energy fellow at the University of Miami specializing in Latin America, told McClatchy Newspapers that Cuba doesn’t have refinery capacity, and the Cuban embargo prohibits the oil from coming to U.S. refineries.

In June, U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Florida, told the St Petersburg (Fla.) Times (the newspaper cited in the American Future Fund’s ad) that reports that any country is drilling off the coast of Florida are untrue.

“Reports to the contrary are simply false,” said Martinez, a Cuban-American and the Senate’s resident Cuba expert. “They’re rumors, akin to urban legend.”

The ad closes by contrasting 45-cents-a-gallon gasoline in Saudi Arabia with fuel prices in the U.S., citing a Wall Street Journal article that warns about the possibility of $6 gasoline. The National Journal points out that the reason gas is so inexpensive in Saudi Arabia is because prices are kept artificially low by government subsidies. The magazine quotes American Future Fund’s communications director, Tim Albrecht, as saying he would be opposed to similar subsidies for American gasoline because “We’re free-market capitalists here.”

The ad was produced by Larry McCarthy, the group’s media strategist, who in 1988 produced the infamous, racially tinged Willie Horton television ad that helped then-Vice President George H.W. Bush bury Michael Dukakis under charges that he was soft on crime.

Representatives of the American Future Fund did not respond to repeated requests to comment for this story.

The ad is expected to run for a week on Fox, MSNBC and CNN.