On Friday's edition of his Fox Business show, Eric Bolling hosted Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) to discuss high gasoline prices. During the segment, Bolling said that if the U.S. produced as much oil as we consume, we wouldn't have to worry about price spikes resulting from turmoil abroad:

BOLLING: Come on, you know as well as I do. If we produced 20 million barrels of oil right here in America and used 20 million barrels of oil right here in America, it wouldn't matter what's going on in Tripoli or Tahrir Square, Egypt.

The fact of the matter is that the U.S. simply will not “produce 20 million barrels of oil” per day in the foreseeable future. We consumed 19.1 million barrels of oil and petroleum products per day in 2010 and produced 7.5 million barrels per day. The American Petroleum Institute says we would only come up with an additional 2.8 million barrels per day by 2025 if all federal lands -- offshore, onshore, Alaska -- were opened to drilling.

But more importantly, even if we did produce that much petroleum, Americans would still be subject to price volatility resulting from events on the other side of the globe.

That's because, as every energy expert I've spoken with has stressed, the price of oil is set on a global market “of around 85 million barrels per day of production and consumption,” in the words of energy economist Michael Canes. This means that drilling more will not allow the U.S. to escape the price effects of supply disruptions in other countries like Libya or the ever-increasing demand from China and India.

Is Bolling trying to tell us (again) that he wants massive government intervention in the oil market?

As Time's Bryan Walsh recently wrote: “Oil is a fungible commodity, meaning there's really no way to ensure that the oil we produce here, stays here. Instead, any additional production would be absorbed and digested by the global oil markets, with little difference in prices at the pump.” Robbie Diamond, President of Securing America's Future Energy similarly explained:

Oil is a fungible global commodity that essentially has a single world benchmark price. Therefore, a supply disruption anywhere in the world affects oil consumers everywhere in the world. A country's exposure to world price shocks is a function of the amount of oil it consumes and is not significantly affected by the ratio of “domestic” to “imported” product. That does not mean that there are not significant advantages to producing more oil domestically--there are--but price is not likely to be among them, except insofar as increased domestic oil would add to the global total and possibly a reduced risk premium in the price because oil from the US is less geopolitically risky.

Indeed, gas prices in Canada have followed the same trajectory as those in the U.S., despite the fact that Canada produces far more petroleum than it consumes, as noted by GOOD contributing editor Ben Jervey. The following chart from GasBuddy.com shows the average price of gas in Canada (red line), the average price of gas in the U.S. (blue line) and the price of crude oil (green line):

Analysts say that while increasing the global supply of oil by ramping up U.S. production will tend to put downward pressure on prices in the longer term, it will not be enough to shield Americans from disruptions abroad, as Bolling claimed. In order to achieve Bolling's lofty goal of insulating Americans from oil price shocks, the U.S government would have to set fuel prices.

Amy Jaffe, director of the Energy Forum at Rice University's Baker Institute, explained via email that if the U.S. wanted to detach our prices from the global market, the government “would have to institute price controls like we were a command economy. ... We would have to suspend the free market and have the government set fuel prices.” Jaffe stated that doing so “creates distortions” in the economy and “has not worked” in the past.

Scientific American similarly reported in 2008:

[D]isruptions to the global supply affect the price of every barrel of oil the U.S. purchases, whether it be from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or off the New Jersey coast. “Suppose the U.S. got all its oil domestically, and the price was $100 a barrel. Then the Saudi family was deposed,” disrupting that country's oil exports, [oil expert Robert] Kaufman says. “The Saudis produce about 10 million barrels a day of the world's 85 million, so clearly prices would go up, because now there is this big shortfall of oil.”

“Do you think oil companies are going to sell [U.S. oil] to U.S. consumers for anything less than top price?,” he asks. “The answer is no.”

What if Congress mandated that the offshore oil could not be exported? “The question of how much of that product that comes out, where it goes, I don't think Congress can dictate,” industry rep Penniman says. “It goes onto the market. It's a free market system...but it is up to Congress [to pass] the laws on what they will and won't open.”

Such a move could in fact increase the nation's energy costs. “Any time you impose a constraint, like 'oil from Alaska cannot go to Japan,'” Kaufman notes, “you're saying, 'don't do the cheapest thing, do something more expensive.' So everybody pays a little more.”

Bolling is often presented as an economic authority on Fox News' purportedly objective news programs, despite the fact that his statements have been repeatedly rejected by energy experts. This pattern raises the question: Does Bolling lack an understanding of how the oil market works or is he just hoping that the rest of us do?