One night this week, I was sitting in my driveway, listening to an interview on NPR with a Democratic congressman on whether to allow more offshore drilling. We don't need to open up more acreage to drilling, the congressman argued, because the oil companies already have plenty of places under coastal waters where they are allowed to drill. They aren't drilling aggressively in those leases, the congressman argued. Why should we give them more?

Intuitively, I knew there had to be more to it. It seems logical that the oil companies would be pumping oil where they can find it. In fact, even if an oil company has thousands of acres leased for exploration, it still has to figure out what's under the ocean floor and whether there's enough oil to make drilling pay. This is a difficult thing to do. If it were easy, I could do it because, hey, I had two semesters of geology.

The problem with the energy debate is that most of the "facts" we hear on the radio and cable news are really just talking points from folks who mostly don't know what they are talking about. The Democrats -- as if they all received the same e-mail Wednesday -- are arguing that the oil companies have plenty of places to drill, and isn't it very curious that they aren't?

The subtext feeds into the suspicion that Big Oil is intentionally keeping new crude off the market until oil is $250 a barrel and Nancy Pelosi is begging them to please, please drill. This is a variant of what we heard in the 1970s, when fleets of oil tankers were said to be steaming in circles, waiting for the price to get high enough.

The Republicans have their own talking points. Or point. It has been reduced to one word: Drill!

There are those who maintain that when President Bush announced the largely symbolic decision to lift the executive moratorium on offshore drilling the other day, the price of oil came down. Proof enough, say the "Drill" enthusiasts, that even the threat of more offshore exploration is enough to scare oil prices down.

What happened to crude lately might have more to do with the fact that the global economy is slowing and high prices have resulted in a buildup of inventories, because Bush's action opens up nothing unless Congress goes along.

But we need to get beyond the talking points, because the debate has been an inch deep so far.

Several weeks ago, when Q editor Van Denton and I were kicking around ideas, we came up with the notion of a Q that would test some of these talking points, particularly as they apply to drilling off the North Carolina coast, and try to get at the truth. The result is that Barb Barrett, a reporter in McClatchy's Washington, D.C., bureau is working on this for Sunday, July 27.

This is also the approach that we have taken to the coverage of campaigns this year. Our Under the Dome blog (dome.newsobserver.com) is particularly focused on fact-checking the statements made by politicians.

Unless you are the sort of person who resists being confused with facts, I would recommend following our coverage of issues like energy as the campaigns progress, because listening to talking heads shouting talking points is not the way to figure these elections out.

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