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Despite
the buyer’s remorse, the morning after
regrets from the Energy Secretary and the press spokesman explaining that Pres.
Bush didn’t really mean it when
he announced during the formal State of the Union speech that the US must end
its addiction to foreign oil (he said “Middle East oil”) by 75% in 15 years,
some have decided he should be held to his word anyway. Let’s hope they can make an honest man
of him, now that public sentiment is against Bush’s sense of direction and
honesty. And the
first and most obvious way to hold Bush’s feet to the fire is to insist that
the Big Oil companies do not continue to receive the outrageously generous
government kickbacks that amount to corporate welfare, when their historic
profits continue at the public’s expense.
Let them continue to diversify and become innovators again. In other
words, let’s see more than lip service during a one-time televised speech. Fish or cut bait. Lead, or get out of the way. Kwc The
Monitor's View For oil addicts, switch-grass gas and more Christian
Science Monitor, Feb. 03, 2006 Perhaps he winced at Iran's threat to cut
oil exports. Or at a similar Venezuela threat. Or at turmoil in oil exporters
Nigeria and Iraq. Or simply at China grabbing every oil patch it can get. But
now President Bush has firmly linked US security to its oil addiction. He made that critical linkage in Tuesday's State of the
Union speech, a startling turnaround for a former Texas oil man who, up to now,
preferred throwing tax breaks at oil firms to find more crude. To be sure, oodles of oil still ooze from the planet, a
giant mass of it in Alberta's gooey tar sands and Colorado's shale. But the
president may have realized two points: Oil prices are likely to remain
permanently high, and America's defense requires it to break its oil addiction,
no matter where the world's remaining oil comes from. With three years left in his term, Mr. Bush needs to show
he's serious about his "Nixon-to-China" trip into a nonoil energy
future. Because
he's framed oil addiction in security terms, he'd best put the same money and
jaw-boning behind the solutions that he deploys in the war on terror. As the world's largest oil user, the US must reduce oil
consumption so
that an Iran cannot easily wield an oil card to get a nuclear weapon. Or so a Saudi Arabia cannot allow oil profits to
filter to terrorists.
Or so a Venezuela
can't throw oil money at anti-US regimes. Or so
a Russia cannot cut off petroleum exports in a strategic dispute. Or, for that matter, so a hurricane like Katrina can't create
an oil price spike. Nor should the US continue to spend billions to deploy its military in the Middle East to
secure that dwindling oil patch - one reason perhaps why Bush set a goal for the US to cut
75% of its oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. Every president since Nixon has promised a new energy
future. The most dramatic success since then has been in conservation, with the
US being about twice as efficient in oil use. More can be done, as Bush promised,
in putting more money into battery research for use in plug-in and hybrid cars.
But the test of his leadership will be in selecting the right projects with the
right amount of money to boost nonoil energy sources - and enable them to be
sustained. To ensure that, he must work with
Democrats to lay down a bipartisan energy future that will survive Washington's political flux.
Last year, the GOP largely rammed through its energy measures, many of which
were larded up with pork-barrel projects and lobbyists' wishes, and largely
directed at finding more oil. But
to replace oil in the US energy mix, government needs to make sure the price of
oil products remains high enough, or taxed enough, to help pay for oil
alternatives.
The switch to other sources will be expensive, and today's oil users must pay
for it. They could, for instance, pay higher prices for more fuel-efficient
vehicles, such as those running on hydrogen or electricity, or pay higher gas
taxes on gasoline to fund nonoil subsidies. The economics of relying on fuel made from corn, sugar cane,
or (as Bush noted) the tall prairie plant called switch grass, still haven't
been proven. But the US needs to expand the breadth of its energy experiments -
and do it with all the zeal of a converted former oil man. http://www.christiansciencemonitor.com/2006/0203/p08s02-comv.html |
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