It feels so good when you put in in your SUV
Addicted to oil? Yeah, but it feels so good. Well, at least the Bush Administration feels that way. Like many Americans, I was (sort of) excited to hear Bush mention ‘reduce oil dependency’ in the SOTU (again), but it looks like it is another say-one-thing-do-another from the Bushies.
In another example of fine reporting from Knight Ridder, we see that the administration has backed off the vow to reduce Mideast oil imports. You heard it right.
According to the article,
his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn’t mean it literally.What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.
But America still would import oil from the Middle East, because that’s where the greatest oil supplies are.
So this is how their double talk works: demand is expected to grow in the next 20 years, with the Middle East imports equating to about 6 million barrels per day (up from 2.2M in 2005). The Bush proposal expects technology and alternative energy to cut demand for oil about 5.26M barrels per day, which is conveniently more than a 75% reduction in oil consumption (when you divide the decrease in overall consumption by the number of barrels we’ll still be importing from the Middle East) — although we’ll still be using more oil than we did in 2005. So we’ll be no better off than we are now. Still using a ton of oil and still getting it from the Middle East.
More from the article:
He pledged to “move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.”Not exactly, though, it turns out.
“This was purely an example,” Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.
Asked why the president used the words “the Middle East” when he didn’t really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that “every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands.” The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble.
Probably the most important thing we can do for our national security and Bush goes and shows us he just isn’t all that serious about the things he says. And why does anyone still think he is doing a good job?
Once again, thanks to Think Progress for the original link.
