Our editorial today applauds President Bush’s call for reducing our nation’s dependence on foreign oil but notes that his prescription is too weak. For example, Bush’s main goal of reducing America’s reliance on Middle Eastern oil by 75 percent by 2025 sounds more bold than it really is: Middle East oil accounts for less than 20 percent of total domestic use. And while it’s good that Bush is proposing more funding for research and development of energy alternatives, it doesn’t reflect the Manhattan Project-level commitment that might provide a real breakthrough. And there was no mention in his State of the Union address of conservation, which could have the biggest immediate impact.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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32 Comments
Shrub is the master of low expectations and empty rhetoric. He is a bigger phony than Clinton(s) and I once thought that to be impossible.
V.L.R.B!!
If the government was serious they would require the auto manufacturers to produce alcohol engines like Ford has been doing for South America for over 40 years. It is about profit and how much each of “our” elected federal representatives gain from not doing so.
Bush is an oil man, his family is an oil family. Raising prices mean more wealth for him and his cronies. That’s the bottom line.
America’s addicted to oil? Well duh, George!!! Raise the price of gas to $5 a gallon and then we’ll see the demand go down. Until you hit people in the wallet, nothing will change. I drove home last night behind a Hummer.
Sorry damoon, I just can’t hardly stand to look at we blog anymore.Seems like everyone with good sense has been run off by a bunch of ninnies. They know who they are.I’m sure they won’t miss me either!
I hope you won’t leave us. Afterall, this is a forum for all opinions. Even though I may disagree with some, I still have the opportunity to learn and grow by reading their posts.If you can’t stand to read some opinions, then just ignore them.We’d miss you if you go.
I just wish that they would finally start allowing the production of more Nuclear power plants…
Not like it would put too big of a dent in the oil side of things, but we would use less coal for sure.
Aside from calling for increased efficiency standards on auto’s the Eagle doesnt seem to have any specific recomendations to add.
Saying the nation should have another “Manhattan” type project doesnt say much. What does the Eagle editorial board suggest we spend all of our resources on?
Alcohol takes a lot of energy from fossil fuels to produce. A wholesale switch over to alcohol would sure take a lot of food producing farm land out of food production. Are we willing to pay a lot more for food?
Nice idea, Nathan, but is just ain’t going to happen. Anymore than there will ever be any more oil drilling off the coast of California. Environmentalists have made sure of that.
How about something like this, Heckler:
1) We adopt a rational system to ban illegal immigration.
2) The president and his administration use the bully pulpit to convince Americans we should build and use more public transportation.
3) In the context of highly regulated and rational immigration – and starting a switch to public transportation on a fresh page, on designed with the weaknesses of same to random terrorism uppermost in mind – we Americans begin to enjoy the aggregate cost savings flowing from public transport that would, at the very least, drive down demand for fossil fuels.
4) American air quality improves.
5) Americans see their “transportation costs” drop dramatically.
6) American wages increase as illegal immigration is eliminated.
7) The American middle class booms again.
Discuss. ;)
Flike,
You forget to mention that all “free trade” agreements need to be scrapped and companies that send jobs overseas and hire foreigners on visa programs need to face tax penalties.
V.L.R.B!!
But Bush WANTS to the illegals to come in so they can do the jobs “Americans don’t want”. I’m still waiting to hear what “jobs” we don’t want, he wasn’t very specific on that.
All we have to do is raise the price of gas to what people in other countries pay, then the situation will take care of itself. People will drive more fuel efficient vehicles and mass transportaion will be developed. Europe has a great mass transit system and so does Washington DC. It can be done. Nothing will change as long as the average American doesn’t have to feel any pain. No pain, no gain.
PhilipAs usual you are changing variables. Last I heard from the liberals we imported half our oil. Of course that was when we were talking about drilling in the USA.If it is only 20%, drilling in Anwar and a few off the Liberal coasts would solve the problem. Hell, just using 15% ethanol would almost fix it. Gotta keep your liberal talking points straight Phil.
Since Harken Energy and Arbusto Oil companies were both Bush family operations with Sausi Arabian business partners I’m sure the Bush family wants independance from middle east oil right???????????????
How many times have the Saudia Arabians helped the USA? In fact was it not 15 Saudi Arabian citizens who attacked the USA on Sept, 11, 2001? We need to be 98 per cent dependant on American farmers for our fuel …. to hell with the terrorists who profit on middle east oil. We need to put America back to being first!
I use as much ethanol as I can from Wichita area Kwik Shop stores. This way we can help mid-west farmers here in the USA and not help middle east terrorists here and abroad. With a dillons card 90 octane ethanol is 2 cents a gallon cheaper than regular gasoline. It saves my wallet and saves an American soldiers life by stopping the flow of money to those who profit from war and oil in the middle east.
Joe,Read the editorial. It says we import almost 60% of our oil. Only 20% comes from the middle east. The other 40% comes from Venezuela, Mexico, Russia, and Canada. That is why the shrub’s declaration to reduce the middle east dependancy by 75% sounds nice, but it really is only 15% reduction.Smoke and mirrors, that is what King George is all about.
Tricky Dicky said, “By the end of the decade, we will not be dependent on foreign oil anymore!”
Bubba Carter said, “By the end of the decade, we will not be dependent on foreign oil anymore!”
George, I never saw an oil well I didn’t own, Bush, said, “By the end of the decade, we will not be dependent on foreign oil anymore!”
Okay, I’m ready . . .
Why in the world would you applaud shrub? Would you congratulate your kid for turning in his homework a month late? Probably not. This has been needed for some time and he has finally decided that it is worth his precious time. I don’t applaud him, I say about time!
While everyone would like to see our oil dependency go down you shouldn’t get excited about this speech.According to our energy secretary Bush didn’t mean that literally.
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/nation/13767738.htm?source=rss&channel=krwashington_nation
Just a question though. If Bush didn’t mean that part of his speech literally, is there any part of his speech we can take literally?
Thanks for the kind words, damoon.You and a couple others I’m familiar with usually have something worth saying. When I get more time I’ll check back to see what’s on your mind. Thanks again.
Flike
Public transportation is fine if you can get people to use it. It’s not feasible in most cities, everything is spread out because we built our cities with the automobile in mind. For the money we would spend on public transportation infrastructure we could build enough nuclear power plants to provide virtually all of our electricity. That would free up all of our coal reserves to be liquified into petroleum. The Nuke plants would also be necessary to create all the Hydrogen we need to convert to a hydrogen economy by the time the coal and oil shale runs out in about 200 years. We would be energy self sufficient.
And I wouldnt have to give up my gas guzzling four wheel drive v-8 powered pickup truck.
We have plenty of oil at home, but thanks to the enviromentalist, we can’t tap into it.
Good points, Heckler.
At least we’re both thinking boldly about this; now if only we could get President Bush to do so!
Finding another energy source is a problem for private business.
Why don’t you and Heckler run for office, flike? Anyone can do a better job than Dubya. Heck, I’d vote for you!
I have been saying for the past few months now that if the Republicans got gas prices down 50 cents to a dollar they would sweep the off year elections.
I don’t know what Bush would have to do, but use some executive power to build more refining here, more dirlling here, whatever it takes. Just do it!
Heck, lets drop a few billion in Mexico, build up their oil infrastructure, build up their refining capacity, their drilling operations and you know what, we all win.
Mexico gets more jobs for their people making us oil.
Mexico’s economy gets bigger off our importing their oil.
Less people in Mexico need to come to America becuase Mexican economy is going up and more jobs.
We get more oil for less and don’t rely on crackpot terrorist regimes like Iran for our oil.
Maybe I am making this too easy and overlooking some things…
It is what I would do.
And I would build some more Nuclear power too :)
Sooner or later we have to quit being dependant on oil. Looking for more ways to obtain oil doesn’t address the underlying problems caused by our dependancy on fossil fuels.We need to change our lifestyle and develop alternate energy sources that will make us less dependant on the stability of foreign governments. I’m not holding my breath, just like our addiction to oil, we’re addicted to our lifestyle. It will take a major crisis for things to dramatically change in this country.
Uhhh If nuclear energy is so clean, can we get mr. bush and his supporters to store the spent fuel rods from nuclear (not nucular) reactors on their own personal property? Now I don’t know about where The idiot Heckler lives, but the tumbledown bush ranch seems a fitting place for storage of these materials. And it would provide the only LASTING memorial ol shrub is gonna have! Of course people could not visit to pay their respects for a couple of hundred years.
I think a very good idea would be fuel rationing. It worked well in another “time of war” My little four banger pickup sips so little gas I’d happily sell someof my ration stamps to someone who feels a god given right to drive around in a vehicle more spacious and accomodating than most residences in the world.
Also, little reminder here. Al Gore pledged to work to do away with the internal combustion engine by…….2025. bush pledges energy independence by……2025! Hey maybe bush should contact Al Gore as to the how since he has already embraced the when!
There are many options to oil but only a few supports the oil industry, bio diesel is one of them. There is a project in southern California where an Arizona company is going to build a solar power generator that when fully completed will support 750,000 homes (I think that was the number I read) using nothing but sun light. These are the types of ideas we need to reduce our oil dependency. As Damoon pointed out getting the oil from Mexico does nothing to reduce our dependency. There are many options available today; we just need an administration dedicated to insuring the security of the US by reducing our need for all oil not just foreign oil.
There is a major project trying to develope a bio-diesal facility in either Missouri or Kansas. They are trying to get farmers to contract soy-bean production with them. Their goal is produce something like 300 million gallons a year. I could be wrong about the figures.I just saw a blip of it on the news.
Mr. Bush talks a good game, however he has already retracted what he has said about cutting oil imports from the middle east. A note the United States only gets less than 20% of its imported oil from the middle east. The rest comes from other countries in this hemisphere.
To show how decietful Mr. Bush is read the below article from the web.
Bush’s One Hour Argument With Himself »
Last night, President Bush conducted a one hour argument with himself, otherwise known as the State of the Union.
And, finally, Mr. Bush challenged the country to reduce its dependence on Middle East oil by 75 percent by the year 2025. He is right. Unfortunately, we have squandered five years as the President and his administration chose the opposite course – maximum production that made us more dependent on imported oil, not less. To paraphrase the Vice President, conservation and a balanced approach to our energy security is not a virtue, but a 21st century national security necessity. Current rates of global consumption of oil are unsustainable. Unless we change course, oil will be the most likely future source of international conflict. We need greater diversity in our energy supply – bio-fuels, renewables and even nuclear energy within a stronger international framework. We need to build greater redundancy in our delivery systems to avoid costly market disruptions like we witnessed following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Unfortunately, the President’s vision will take 20 years to achieve. We would be more secure had he put the national interest ahead of special interests when he first came into office.
– P.J. Crowley « collapse post
Filed under: State of the Union
ENERGY:
By identifying only Mideast oil imports for reductions, Bush was ignoring some of the largest sources of U.S. petroleum, among them Canada, Mexico, Nigeria and Venezuela. The U.S. considers Venezuela a source of political instability in the region; relations with Mexico have been strained over immigration; and violence has curbed nearly 10 percent of Nigeria’s oil output.
Imports of oil and refined product from the Persian Gulf make up less than a fifth of all imports, according to the government.
Bush has spoken of reducing reliance on foreign oil in every State of the Union speech, if not as explicitly as in this one, and presidents back toRichard Nixon outlined similar goals, to little or no effect.
Nixon announced Project Independence in 1973, setting a goal of energy self-sufficiency in seven years. Then, the U.S. imported 35 percent of its oil; now it’s close to 60 percent. This, despite substantive steps taken by Nixon and Jimmy Carter to spur both supply and conservation, including construction of the Alaskan oil pipeline and reduction in the highway speed limit to 55 mph for many years.
By Kevin G. HallKnight Ridder NewspapersWASHINGTON – One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, 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.
The president’s State of the Union reference to Mideast oil made headlines nationwide Wednesday because of his assertion that “America is addicted to oil” and his call to “break this addiction.”
Bush vowed to fund research into better batteries for hybrid vehicles and more production of the alternative fuel ethanol, setting a lofty goal of replacing “more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.”
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.
He said the broad goal was to displace foreign oil imports, from anywhere, with domestic alternatives. He acknowledged that oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms. Consequently, it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth.
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.
Presidential adviser Dan Bartlett made a similar point in a briefing before the speech. “I think one of the biggest concerns the American people have is oil coming from the Middle East. It is a very volatile region,” he said.
Through the first 11 months of 2005, the United States imported nearly 2.2 million barrels per day of oil from the Middle East nations of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. That’s less than 20 percent of the total U.S. daily imports of 10.062 million barrels.
Imports account for about 60 percent of U.S. oil consumption.
Alan Hubbard, the director of the president’s National Economic Council, projects that America will import 6 million barrels of oil per day from the Middle East in 2025 without major technological changes in energy consumption.
The Bush administration believes that new technologies could reduce the total daily U.S. oil demand by about 5.26 million barrels through alternatives such as plug-in hybrids with rechargeable batteries, hydrogen-powered cars and new ethanol products.
That means the new technologies could reduce America’s oil appetite by the equivalent of what we’re expected to import from the Middle East by 2025, Hubbard said.
But we’ll still be importing plenty of oil, according to the Energy Department’s latest projection.
“In 2025, net petroleum imports, including both crude oil and refined products, are expected to account for 60 percent of demand … up from 58 percent in 2004,” according to the Energy Information Administration’s 2006 Annual Energy Outlook.
Some experts think Bush needs to do more to achieve his stated goal.
“We can achieve energy independence from the Middle East, but not with what the president is proposing,” said Craig Wolfe, the president of Americans for Energy Independence in Studio City, Calif. “We need to slow the growth in consumption. Our organization believes we need to do something about conservation” and higher auto fuel-efficiency standards.
Kansas and bio-diesel would be a perfect match. From what little I know about it’s production corn, soy, and used deep fryer oil can be used (among several other crops). I believe Kansas would get a much need jump on other states if they got in on this now. What Kansas now needs is a legislature with the will and intelligence to make it happen.
The Kansas City Star has a couple of excellent opinions in todays paper on Bush and his addiction to oil.
One of the opinions is a right/left article. The right is probably one of the most blatant examples of threatening blackmail as I have ever read. Basically it says: “Put a winfall tax on us and you will be paying at the pumps, if we decide to put enough oil on the market.” American business at its worst.