Gas Guzzling Ourselves to Death

Weaning ourselves off foreign oil is near impossible when you have oil men running the government.
Thomas Friedman

Listen to Mr. Cheney's answer when the conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham asked him how he reacted to my urgings for a gasoline tax to push all Americans to drive energy-saving vehicles and make us energy-independent — now.

"Well, I don't agree with that," Mr. Cheney said. "I think — the president and I believe very deeply that, obviously, the government has got a role to play here in terms of supporting research into new technologies and encouraging the development of new methods of generating energy. ... But we also are big believers in the market, and that we need to be careful about having government come in, for example, and tell people how to live their lives. ... This notion that we have to 'impose pain,' some kind of government mandate, I think we would resist. The marketplace does work out there."

What is he talking about? The global oil market is anything but free. It's controlled by the world's largest cartel — OPEC — which sets output, and thereby prices, according to the needs of some of the worst regimes in the world. By doing nothing, we are letting their needs determine the price and their treasuries reap all the profits.

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Finally, if Mr. Cheney believes so much in markets, why did the 2005 energy act contain about $2 billion in tax breaks for oil companies? Why does his administration permit a 54-cents-a-gallon tax on imported ethanol — fuel made from sugar or corn — so Brazilian sugar exports won't compete with American sugar? Yes, we tax imported ethanol from Brazil, but we don't tax imported oil from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or Russia.

Those poor suffering at the verge of financial ruin oil companies really need some more subsidies. Exxon only made what 10.71 billion dollars in profit, the largest profit in US history, for the last quarter of 2005? Other oil companies haven't been doing too shabby either.

Last week, Chevron Corp. reported that its fourth-quarter profit was up 20 percent from the year before. Also last week, ConocoPhillips reported a 51 percent increase in fourth-quarter profit and Marathon Oil Corp. said that its fourth-quarter profit nearly tripled. Oil giants BP PLC and Royal Dutch Shell PLC have yet to report their profits.

And then there's Bush's SOTU speech which explicitly called for the US to reduce Mideast oil imports 75% by 2025. Which was an outright misrepresentation of the facts.

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.

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"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.

Our energy policy is atrocious. And Bush certainly isn't going to make it any better. And while I believe that even ignoring his "misrepresentation" of oil consumption from the Middle East, it looks like reducing worldwide oil imports isn't off to a good start.

President Bush's latest spending plan is unlikely to substantially reduce US oil consumption in the short term because it slashes $100 million from federal programs promoting conservation and falls short of the commitment in last year's energy bill to make vast new investments in renewable and emerging technologies, like hydrogen fuel and solar power.

Despite Bush's ambitious goal of cutting Middle East oil imports by 75 percent within 20 years -- outlined in his State of the Union address a week ago -- the president's budget calls for an 18 percent cut in programs aimed at reducing energy consumption, like financial aid to help needy families better insulate their homes and research to make cars use fuel more efficiently.

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''The reality in no way meets the rhetoric," said Dan W. Reicher, president of New Energy Capital, a Vermont-based renewable energy company. Reicher, deputy energy secretary under President Clinton, said the White House budget cuts ''energy efficiency and other vital programs in order to pay for renewable-energy increases. It's hard to see that we reach the goals the president has set."

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Though Bush's budget calls for a $381 million increase in spending on renewable energy technologies, some fear the money set aside for renewable energy isn't enough to make a real difference, while others say it depends too much on nuclear power.

The extra money for renewable energy is still 22 percent less than the commitments laid out in the energy bill signed by Bush last year, according to an analysis conducted by Democratic staff members on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The $195.8 million the president wants for hydrogen research, for example, is barely a third of the total authorized by the energy bill.

More money for foreign oil means more money to Saudi Arabia which means more money to extremist Whabbist charities which means more money for terrorists. So the response to this is... less money than proposed for reducing energy consumption, but maintaining tax cuts. Once and oil man always an oil man.