BOB GARFIELD: The debate over how to quench America's relentless thirst for oil, like many political arguments, is extremely polarizing, characterized by emotion, rhetoric and lots of apparently conflicting statistics. But according to a new report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, there is reliable information to be had -- at least when it comes to the amount of recoverable oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And according to the report called Sorry, Wrong Number, those "facts" are being misrepresented by advocates on both sides of the drilling debate and, in turn, being misused by the media. Jonathan Koomey spearheaded the report. He is currently a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. He says there are three ways to measure the oil in the Arctic Refuge, but in the debate over drilling only one meaningful number.

JONATHAN KOOMEY: You can look at it as how much oil is in place -- you know the absolute amount -- and then you can look at how much can be extracted using current technology. Then you can look at how much of that-- that could be extracted can be extracted economically. And the one that is most relevant to the debate over whether or not to drill is: how much oil is economically recoverable given the range of recent oil prices?

BOB GARFIELD:Okay. Let's just stipulate for the moment that you're right about that -- that that's the only relevant statistic. What has been reported around the country?

JONATHAN KOOMEY: Well what we've found when we looked at 35 different articles was that a range of between zero and 20 billion barrels of oil was reported as how much oil you could extract, and if you look at it in terms of economically recoverable oil, the range given recent oil prices is only between zero and 5.6 billion barrels, and so what you had after looking at these different news reports, you had this impression that the actual amount of oil that would be economically recoverable is much, much higher than what the U.S. Geological Survey study said for economically recoverable oil.

BOB GARFIELD: Is the mis-reporting happening irrespective of the perceived political biases of the news organizations?

JONATHAN KOOMEY:There's no obvious relationship between the amount of oil that was reported to be in the Arctic Refuge and the political orientations of the news organizations -- they would go to advocates on both sides of the debate and, of course the advocates for drilling took estimates that made it seem like there would be a lot of oil, and the people who oppose oil drilling did the opposite. And so you had this interesting case where there's one source of the data -- the U.S. Geological Survey -- and the advocates on either side of the debate took the numbers that were most convenient for their case, and the media used the quotations from these different advocates -- instead of going back to the original source -- and in the process of that created a mis-impression, because the range that was cited typically tended to over-estimate the amount of economically recoverable reserves from the Arctic Refuge.

BOB GARFIELD: All this erratic behavior is kind of disturbing. What lessons can journalists draw from your study?

JONATHAN KOOMEY:Number one: sometimes there are right and wrong answers. What tends to happen is that the media see this as, you know, there's, there's a debate - there has to be two sides to this. Sometimes though, in scientific literature, there are not two sides, and that's important for them to realize. Second, it's very important to go back to the original source. And the last key thing is: make sure you get the definitions right. Make sure you're explaining exactly what the number is.

BOB GARFIELD: So in a funny way, actually, the journalists' laudable pre-occupation with balance causes them to misrepresent truth.

JONATHAN KOOMEY:In some cases, that's correct. Obviously in political debates and so on you need to make sure that all sides are, are somehow heard. But it is important to understand that in certain kinds of technical topics, there are right and wrong answers.

BOB GARFIELD: Jonathan Koomey, thank you very much!

JONATHAN KOOMEY: Thank you!

BOB GARFIELD:Jonathan Koomey is a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and author of the book Turning Numbers into Knowledge. That could sell up to -- somewhere between zero and 20 billion copies. [LAUGHTER] In terms of copies sellable with current technology and available audience-- [LAUGHTER] I'm going to say [LAUGHS] that it's at the low end of that spectrum.

JONATHAN KOOMEY: That's probably right. [MUSIC]