THE world produces 80m barrels of oil a day, give or take;
America consumes 19m or so of that. Today, Barack Obama ordered
the release of 30m barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
It should trickle out over the next month, in conjunction with
another 30m from other countries' stockpiles. That works out at
another 2m b/d for the next month, or a 2.5% boost to supply.
That's nothing to be sniffed at, of course: on the margin, a
shift of 2.5% can have quite an impact on price. If the 140m
barrels lost to the market thanks to the turmoil in Libya can
help to push the price up, then an extra 60m barrels, released
over a shorter period, should be able to depress it a bit. The
oil price did indeed fall on news of the opening spigots, by
about 5%.  Nonetheless, Mr Obama's move serves mainly to
illustrate his impotence with regard to the oil price. The
entire SPR contains only 727m barrels—38 days' supply for
America, or nine for the world. Even the relatively tiny amount
Mr Obama proposes to unload from it h