Republicans Debate in Des Moines

We can't predict the future, so perhaps McCain can make this happen. But experts have serious doubts. "There's just no way," says Frank Verrastro, director of the Energy and National Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "You can't institute technological change that quickly," he tells FactCheck.org, adding that the U.S. couldn't ramp up alternative fuels that quickly. "It takes 15 years now to turn over the car fleet," he says. Verrastro's organization and the National Petroleum Council issued a report this summer, commissioned by the secretary of energy, that found the U.S. could reduce its reliance on oil imports by a third by 2030 if it instituted various measures, such as increasing fuel efficiency, domestic sources of oil and non-petroleum fuels.

Another study, partly funded by the Pentagon and published in 2004 by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on energy policy, said it would take until 2040 for the nation to be free of all oil imports, by primarily using new technologies and competition. The nonprofit Americans for Energy Independence vows to "use grass roots support to achieve our independence by the year 2025."

About 66 percent of the oil used in the U.S. in 2006 came from foreign imports, which amounted to 13.7 million barrels a day. Says Verrastro: "Getting rid of that in five years is a huge task."

How Low Can You Go?
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney exaggerated the extent to which the U.S. lags behind other industrial nations in education. He said, "Our kids score in the bottom 10 or 25 percent in exams around the world among major industrial nations." That's not so. Actually, the U.S. ranked closer to the 50th percentile than the bottom quarter, according to the most recent rankings by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an internationally standardized study administered to15-year-old schoolchildren in 57 countries.

Students in several nations were tested in 2006. In science, the U.S. ranked 29th out of 57, or at the 49th percentile. And in math, the U.S. ranked 35th out of 57, or at the 39th percentile. The U.S. was not ranked in reading for 2006 because of a testing misprint, but in the previous round of testing in 2003 U.S. students again landed near the middle, scoring 15th out of 29, or at the 48th percentile.

A Romney campaign aide said the candidate was referring to a much earlier study in which the United States finished 19th out of 21 nations in math and 16th out of 21 nations in science. But that study, the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) is from 1998.