The Green River Formation, a largely vacant area of mostly federal land that covers the territory where Colorado, Utah and Wyoming come together, contains about as much recoverable oil as all the rest the world’s proven reserves combined, an auditor from the Government Accountability Office told Congress on Thursday.

The GAO testimony stressed that the federal government was in “a unique position to influence the development of oil shale” because the Green River deposits were mostly beneath federal land.

It also noted that developing the oil would pose “socioeconomic challenges,” which included bringing “a sizable influx of workers who along with their families put additional stress on local infrastructure” and “making planning for growth difficult for local governments.”

“The Green River Formation–an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming–contains the world’s largest deposits of oil shale,”Anu K. Mittal, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment said in written testimony submitted to the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and Environment.

“USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions,” Mittal testified.

“The Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that 30 to 60 percent of the oil shale in the Green River Formation can be recovered,” Mittal told the subcommittee. “At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.”

In her oral statement before the subcommittee, Mittal said that developing the shale oil would create wealth and jobs for the country, but also challenges for government.

“Being able to tap this vast amount of oil locked within this formation will go a long way to help to meet our future demands for oil. The U.S. Geological Survey, as you noted, estimates that the formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil of which half may be recoverable,” she said.

“As you can imagine having the technology to develop this vast energy resource will lead to a number of important socioeconomic benefits including the creation of jobs, increases in wealth and increases in tax and royalty payments for federal and state governments,” she said.

“While large-scale oil-shale development offers socioeconomic opportunities it also poses certain socioeconomic challenges that also should not be overlooked,” she testified. “Oil shale development like other extractive industries can bring a sizable influx of workers who along with their families put additional stressed on local infrastructure. Development from expansion of extractive industries has historically followed a boom-and-bust cycle making planning for growth difficult for local governments.”

In her written testimony, Mittal noted that three-fourths of the Green River shale oil is under federal land.

“The federal government is in a unique position to influence the development of oil shale because nearly three-quarters of the oil shale within the Green River Formation lies beneath federal lands managed by the Department of the Interior’s (Interior) Bureau of Land Management (BLM),” she testified.

Can you imagine what will happen when President Romney is in charge?  What boggles our mind is how ANY sane person can vote for this community-organizer

Sometimes a trivial embarrassment can become a teachable moment. t was recently revealed that Harvard professor and U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren had self-identified as a Native American for nearly a decade — apparently to enhance her academic career by claiming minority status. Warren, a blond multimillionaire, could not substantiate her claim of 1/32 Cherokee heritage. (And would it have reflected any better on her if she could have?) Instead, she fell back on the stereotyped caricature that she had “high cheekbones.”

Not long ago, University of Colorado academic Ward Churchill was likewise exposed as a fraud in his claims of Native American ancestry. This racial con artist was able to fabricate an entire minority identity and parlay it into an activist professorship otherwise not possible for a white male of his limited talent.

In the Trayvon Martin murder case, the media was intent on promulgating a white oppressor/black victim narrative as proof of endemic white prejudice that still haunts America and thus requires perpetual recompense.

However, a glitch arose when it was learned that Zimmerman had a Peruvian mother. By university and government diversity standards, he could be characterized as a “minority.” That bothersome fact threatened to undermine the entire hyped narrative of white-on-black crime. So the panicked media coined a new hybrid term for Zimmerman: “white Hispanic.”

Note that the media has so far not in commensurate fashion referred to President Obama as a “white African-American” even though he too had a white parent. In Obama’s memoirs, we learn that well into his 20s he self-identified as “Barry.” Only later did Obama begin using his African name, Barack, which at some key juncture offered a more valuable cachet than did the suburban-sounding “Barry.”

Is there anything wrong with such chameleon-like self-identification in an age when universities are full of hyphenated careerists and newscasters awkwardly trill their names to remind us of their particular ethnicity?

In the last 50 years, massive immigration from Asia, Africa and Latin America, coupled with rapid rates of integration and intermarriage, have created a truly multiracial society. So-called whites, for example, are now a minority of the population in California, and millions of people of mixed ancestry don’t identify with any particular ethnic group.

Does a Joe Lopez, the son of a white mother and a Hispanic father, “count” as Hispanic while a Joe Schmidt, the son of a Hispanic mother and a white father, does not? What about a José Schmidt?

For that answer, ask George Zimmerman. Had he applied for college admission or a certain type of job, a politically correct university or an employer pressed to meet diversity quotas mostly certainly would have dubbed Zimmerman “Hispanic.”

Identities, in psychodramatic fashion, are sometimes put on and taken off, like clothes, as self-interest dictates — given that so often they are no longer ascertainable from appearance. If that sounds crass or unfair, ask Elizabeth Warren, who dropped her Native American claims as soon as she at last received tenure and found her 1/32 con suddenly superfluous — to the apparent unconcern of her similarly cynical but now mum employer, Harvard.

Nor is race sure proof of either poverty or past oppression. Asian Americans, for example, have a median family income more than $10,000 a year higher than white Americans. And if pigmentation is proof of ongoing prejudice, why don’t darker Punjabis and Arabs — who do not qualify for special racial preferences — deserve consideration over those lighter-skinned minorities who do?

How long after a Mexican national crossed the border would he become a Chicano eligible for affirmative action? Do Attorney General Eric Holder’s children qualify? Do 1/32 (one great-great-great grandparent) or 1/16 (one great-great grandparent) Cherokees receive preferential treatment? And if so, who administers this odious Jim Crow one-drop DNA test, and how?

In truth, after a half-century in our self-created racial labyrinth, no one quite knows who qualifies as an oppressed victim or why — only that the more one can change a name or emphasize lineage, the better the careerist edge. The real worry is that soon we will have so many recompense-seeking victims that we will run out of concession-granting oppressors.

How odd (or rather, how predictable) that something that started out as a supposedly noble lie — that to atone for past bias we must be judged by the color of our skin rather than the content of our character — has become utterly ignoble and beneath us.

(Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of the just-released “The End of Sparta.”

Today, you’ll be hearing a lot about President Obama’s decision to finally say in public what everyone assumes he’s been saying in private: that he favors same-sex marriages. Yawn.

But what struck us in Obama’s taped interview with ABC News was a brief passage in the longer interview. It’s a stunner, even for The Aloof One. President Obama openly states his belief that members of the American military stationed in dangerous places around the world are fighting for him. And the national interest?

Here’s what he said: “When I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf…”

And so many of us thought the U.S. military was protecting all Americans.

Scroll down for the full Obama comment on same-sex marriage. This is another of those subjects that Obama didn’t really want to talk about until after the Nov. 6 election, when he’d be forever free from any future voter accountability. Thirty states — most recently voters in North Carolina on Tuesday — have stated that marriage is between one man and one woman. legally and constitutionally.

Last weekend Joe Biden made an uber-gaffe, possibly the worst of his %#$&@# career. He said that, well, he supports same-sex marriage. For years Obama has said that marriage was between one person of each gender.

So, Joe’s flat-out assertion to the contrary raised all kinds of questions about where does his boss stand, is there a split between the nation’s top two elected Democrats and why the Obama reluctance to say what he really believes? What’s he hiding?

To stem the PR bleeding from both political sides, Obama decided to come out of the rhetorical closet in an interview with ABC News’ Good Morning America to be aired this morning. To drum up viewers, excerpts were released Wednesday.

This president, once known here as the Real Good Talker, sure likes long sentences now. Here’s the complete referenced passage:

“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together; when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”