"Addiction" Prediction: The President's Promise Will Turn Out to be Fiction
"Addiction" Prediction: The President's Promise Will Turn Out to be Fiction
February 3, 2006
This week President Bush delivered his fifth State of the Union Address in a difficult climate of public skepticism about both the integrity and competence of our government. While I believe most Americans tend to sympathize with the aspirations expressed in a State of the Union address, a president in his second term is often confronted with the disappointment of a public who has heard many of promises in past years and is not impressed with the president's track record in keeping them. That is certainly the case this time.
I have served on the Energy Committee here in Congress since 1976, pressing our government that entire time to move toward a renewable energy future. During that time I have seen every president, without exception, announce that we must do more to reduce our reliance on foreign oil, and then proceed to adopt policies which simply continue it. George Bush has kept the streak alive, with some particularly colorful flourishes.
The same president who now bemoans America's "addiction to oil" has enabled the pushers to a remarkable degree.
One of the most incomprehensible policies designed to deepen the addiction is the $25,000 tax deduction the Bush Administration supports for the purchase of Humvees and other very heavy, very inefficient SUVs. Compare that to the $2500 tax credit for the purchase of a hybrid, and you have a good idea of why our fleet of cars and trucks keeps getting less efficient even as our mastery of technology gets better and better. The same government that believes we can perfect Star wars technology to shoot down a bullet with a bullet acts as if auto mechanics is just too hard!
But that's just one example. President Bush has been very active in feeding America's addiction to fossil fuels. Recall that:
In 2001, the Cheney Energy Task Force met secretly with the big oil and gas companies to craft a national energy plan that proposed a smorgasbord of tax breaks, deregulation, free drilling rights on many public lands, and special exemptions from environmental laws.
Over the next four years, the Bush Administration proceeded to implement the administrative recommendations of the Cheney Task Force, while pushing Congress to enact legislation to implement the remaining recommendations.
In August 2005, the Republican-controlled Congress finally enacted the Bush energy bill. While Republicans touted this new legislation's benefits, it has become apparent to most observers that the Republican energy bill does virtually nothing to wean America from its oil addiction or reduce our dependence on imported oil. It was driven by a futile desire to drill our way to energy independence.
This Republican bill gave nearly $8 billion dollars in tax breaks to the big oil companies to pad their record profits and allowed for them to drill on the public lands without paying any fees.
In the aftermath of enactment of this bill, consumers have seen gasoline prices and home heating prices reach new highs, while oil company profits soar to heights never previously achieved by any corporation in history. Moreover, our dependence on foreign oil has simply gone up and is now over 60 percent.
To reverse this momentum will take a Herculean effort by a very determined president willing to spend a lot of political capital taking on the oil and gas industry, the auto industry and a wide swath of his big business base. That's not happening. In his State of the Union Address, the President stated that we needed to dramatically increase our nation's investment in alternative energy technologies in order so that America could cut its reliance on imported oil from the Middle East by 75% by 2025. Just a day after the President's speech, the President's senior energy advisors had an "Emily Litella" moment in which they - like Gilda Radner's Saturday Night Live character, essentially said, "Never Mind." They announced that the President's goal of actually reducing Middle Eastern oil imports into the U.S. is not to be taken literally.
Once the details of the President's new energy initiative began to emerge, it became clear that there is little that is new behind the President's rhetoric. To propose a $5 million increase in wind energy research, a $65 million increase in solar research, hydrogen by $53 million at a time when a single oil company earns $10 billion in just one quarter is a joke. And his failure to confront our energy problems is destined to be remembered as an historic failure - for its broad adverse impact on our environment, our economy, our health and the constraints it places on our foreign policy.
Progress on energy is a huge opportunity -- fuel economy standards should be raised, hybrid cars encouraged, ethanol produced not just in the corn belt, but throughout the land. But it is apparent that an administration led by and dominated by oil men and women is not well positioned to break America's deep addiction to oil.
http://markey.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1122&Itemid=87