"New" Bush Call To Cut Foreign Oil Habit 35 Years Old - NYT

[hatrack]

EDIT

President Richard M. Nixon promised in 1971 to make the United States self-sufficient in energy by 1980. President Jimmy Carter promised in 1979 that the nation would "never again use more foreign oil than we did in 1977." And Mr. Bush has called in each of his past four State of the Union addresses for a reduction in the dependence on foreign oil. Despite those promises in the past 35 years, United States dependence on oil imports is at a record level.

For most of his presidency, Mr. Bush has placed top priority on increasing domestic oil and gas production. He has supported tax incentives for oil and gas drilling, aggressive production in the Gulf of Mexico, and opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

But in his speech Tuesday night, he said the United States should "move beyond a petroleum-based economy." The strategies he listed are under way already; in fact, he noted that since he took office the federal government had spent "nearly $10 billion to develop cleaner, cheaper, more reliable alternative energy sources."

EDIT

At the moment, renewable energy is a very small part of consumption, a little more than 6 percent. Of that amount, more than one-third is hydroelectric; solar and wind account for about two-tenths of a percent. Mr. Bush did not say that renewable energy would replace oil from the Middle East; he also listed coal plants that capture their carbon dioxide, and nuclear energy, which some backers argue is renewable but many other people do not.

Two obvious energy steps were missing from the speech. Although Mr. Bush praised ethanol as a substitute for gasoline, he did not mention the idea of lowering import barriers so countries like Brazil could supply it to this country. Instead he stressed "homegrown" ethanol. And he did not talk about requiring higher fuel economy standards for consumer vehicles.

EDIT/END

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/politics/01energy.html

[kenny blankenship]

1. It's easy to call for, BECAUSE IT CAN'T BE DONE

as long as we're burning hydrocarbons as fuel for energy, foreign petroleum and natural gas are going to form the majority of that fuel. (Until they're 'bout gone becoming more expensive than saffron per pound, and we're forced to begin distilling pine tar and coal for fuel)
We started finding and drilling out our own reserves first, and they got depleted first. Nothing President fuckface or his successors say or do will change that. We might have altered our course in the 1970s, and changed the pattern of our style of developement, requiring less transportable liquid fuels to run our way of life. But we failed to take it seriously. "Ending dependence on foreign oil" is just a hollow political phrase repeated by xenophobic politicians to make people believe that they're doing something and looking out for the dangers. They aren't and never have been. It's all lies. The only way we can ever become self-sufficient for our liquid hydrocarbon fuels again is to annex Iraq, or Venezuela and Canada.

[kenny blankenship]

9. America created a world of INTERDEPENDENCE && Now it must live with it.

That's what it comes down to. We WILL depend on others for the petroleum and gas that fuels our monstrously inefficient economy and way of life, and which will continue to be the mainstay of our way of life for the next generation at least AND...
...THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES. We cannot avoid this, even as we look for replacement technologies. The fact is that there are no technological solutions proposed, as even plausible let alone deliverable, which do not also require changes to our wasteful and disorganized way of life. Our domestic policies must change radically to bring about a future worth living in.

And while we remain dependent on hydrocarbon fuels there will be consequences for our foreign policies too. We have a choice to make: we can plunder the world's remaining supplies of oil at gunpoint, and kill whoever gets in our way (whole countries maybe), or we can live with the presence of other people in the world, who have things that we need and who disagree with our habit of unilaterally disposing of their lands and governments.

I would point to history and ask: would it have been wiser, in the long run, for the Japanese to accept that they were inescapably dependent on others for petroleum, rather than start a war of oilfield grabbing? As part of the price they paid for that mistake, two of their cities were incinerated by atom bombs. As horrible as those two events were, they were just a small fraction of the hideous price that Japan ultimately had to pay for asserting its "autonomy" against rival powers.

Would it have been sooo bad for Japan to give up its drive for empire in China, in order to regain access to U.S. oil? Obviously in the full reckoning of costs, it would have been the much smarter thing to do.

Will we choose the smarter thing? Or will we keep going down the route of mass murder like Imperial Japan?

[JohnWxy]

14. I think that 's what Cheney had in mind when he pushed us into invading

IRAQ.

[applegrove]

2. I think the less clubby estimates of peak oil are for well before 2025

anyway. So the amount America imports will be much less by then.

I don't think Bush really suggested much.

Like someone said - USA needs "race to the moon" funding to get the alternative fuels going. Seems 22% is kinda like the Drug plan - meant to quell their political foes on the issue - not meant to actually transform the relationship between consumer & oil.

[unblock]

3. developing alternative sources of energy is half of the equation, at best

the more important part is limiting our consumption.

making things more efficient, making more with less, avoiding waste, etc. of the alternatives, only some are permanently renewable, and all have their own risks and problems. the best solution involves ratcheting back on consumption in addition to developing better alternative sources.

[David Zephyr]

4. President Jimmy Carter actually did something about it in 1980.

Jimmy Carter, in his famous "Malaise" speech, introduced the idea of wind-fall profit taxing to help the U.S. begin to strip itself away from dependency on oil.

When Carter later lost the election that year, incoming President Ronald Reagan and his Saudi-Whore Vice President George Bush, reversed Carter's energy direction and kept it that way for the next 12 years.

[phantom power]

5. Really, our direction never changed after Reagan. Still hasn't.

There was a lot of happy-talk during the 90s, but the reality on the ground was SUVs, ultra-cheap oil, and exploding suburbs.

[hatrack]

6. Yes, "Morning in America", etc. - guess all that sunlight blinded us

:eyes:

[phantom power]

7. I know *I* had to wear shades.

[David Zephyr]

8. I have posted President Carter's 1979 Speech in the Gen Forum.

I hope everyone here at the DU will take the time to read what a real leader said clear back in 1979.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=297068&mesg_id=297068

[phantom power]

10. For the love of god, take it away. It's too painful.

[David Zephyr]

11. It is painful, isn't it?

It's just enough to make you hang your head and cry.

[NNadir]

12. I am rather surprised that this requires comment to notice.

[umass1993]

13. reporter is wrong ....

The 2 "solutions" he proposed were not solutions at all.

there is only one way to reduce the use of a scarce commodity.
It's called "raising the price."

If there were a way around this simple fact, then we would be
doing it with everything else we buy/use.

More efficient cars will not necessarily reduce the total amount of fuel we use, and importing more energy from Brazil will only defer the problem.

Shows you what a reporter from the NYTimes knows...not a damn bit more than your average lemming on the street.

[Strelnikov_]

15. I Surrender. Please Give Me My Lobotomy Now

I have seen my Room 101. It is being forced to make sense of Man or Monkeys energy policy.