Had President Bush exercised the skills of a leader with vision when he took office nearly eight years ago, much of today's panic over fuel prices and energy shortages would have been avoided through national conservation and innovation.
The future, however, was forecast darkly by that stalwart protector of the oil industry and naysayer about global warming, Vice President Dick Cheney.
Energy conservation, the gloomy Cheney said with dismissive condescension, is nothing more than a commendable "personal virtue," not national policy.
So, with Americans thus encouraged to guzzle fuel as fast as they could buy it, domestic petroleum production and refining can't keep up.
To finally appear to be doing something, President Bush recently was reduced to going hat in hand to the Saudi Arabian royal family, begging for oil spigots to be opened wider. At the same time, presumptive Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain cobbled together an energy policy of desperation that calls for more off-shore drilling in sensitive locations and construction of scores of new nuclear power plants.
Other nations, on the other hand, have innovated and sacrificed with designs and building materials requiring less energy. In Brazil, for example, thousands of vehicles have dual fuel tanks for gasoline and ethanol, a feature unavailable in the United States because most service stations don't provide both. Urban living and work is promoted to reduce drive time.
The nation would have been better served had Bush and Cheney used their time to promote sensible energy consumption, not acted as cheerleaders for waste.
