We wanted to believe President Bush.
In his State of the Union address, he trotted out a dazzling roster of alternate energy sources that he said could replace more than 75 percent of Middle East imported oil by 2025. (Canadian oil imports--15.7 percent -- are more than Saudi Arabia's 12.6 percent.)
We wanted to believe that he was serious about dealing with America's growing dependence on foreign oil.
Yet even as the president spoke glowingly of ethanol and other substitute fuels now only envisioned, the Bush White House announced it was cutting by 15 percent the budget of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory outside Denver and laying off 40 staffers. The lab is involved in researching alternate fuel sources.
The president apparently forgot to inform the White House budget cutters of his whole-hearted support for alternate fuels.
The presidential razzmatazz was too much even for the conservative nationally syndicated columnist, George Will.
Will wrote Thursday that the president's assertions are "wonderfully useless," asking, "Replace (oil) with what?" To that he added, "Such recurring goals, located safely over the horizon, resemble Soviet agricultural quotas, except no one will be shot when they are not met."
President Bush neglected to mention workable solutions to energy addiction. he could ask Congress to enact now. Instead he proffered tantalizing future technologies to avoid harder realities.
First, he should have called for dramatic improvements in fuel consumption efficiency of vehicles, which guzzle more than half of America's daily oil supply. But Vice President Cheney's deal with automakers to not to expect more of them is so rigid that not even the national crisis of oil "addiction" is enough to rattle the White House into patriotic duty.
Second, he should have called for an increased fuel tax. In 2004, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that a federal gasoline tax of 46 cents (it's 18 cents today) would reduce gasoline consumption by 10 percent over 14 years and help fund a crash program of new technologies. Nowhere did the president say how the nation's war-strapped budget could sustain development of new fuels.
Third, Bush should have called for better funding and planning for mass transit. Today's transportation accounting favors asphalt and more freeways over light rail transit, something that needs to change if we are to reduce oil consumption.
The nation should embark on a crash program to reduce oil dependency now—but it will take more than confusing hollow speeches to get the job done.
