Bush Waffles on Energy

Last January, Bush said America needs to do something about its addiction to oil. He changed his mind the next day. Several times in the last week, he again has said we need to do something. And then he does nothing. Somebody should do a good post on all the times Bush has contradicted himself on energy, oil, global warming and the environment. The Decider-in-Chief can't make up his mind what his facts and energy policy are.

The volatility in the energy markets is probably here to stay awhile but even if it isn't it's years past the time we should be doing something about it. But first, we better start talking realistically about what's going on. Different people have different ideas out there and it's worth hearing what they have to say. Here's the Energy Bullentin with a speech by Bill Clinton, the last president who actually knew how to make FEMA effective:

...The second thing that I would like to talk briefly about is global warming. I believe that it is the only existential threat that, those of you who are students here, your generation faces. It could literally undermine your ability to raise your children and grandchildren. A whole spade of new books and studies have come out in the last couple of months, and I will just cite two or three. A dig through the ice pac in Antarctica, deeper than any before it had achieved has enabled us to measure the pattern of climate warming in the last two hundred years. The climate is warming more rapidly than anytime in the last two hundred thousand years. Homosapiens stood up on the planes of the savannah in East Africa somewhere between 130,000-150,000 years ago. This goes back before the time when our species was on the planet. The last ice age receded 15,000 years ago that allowed people to move across the globe. They were five civilizations on earth five thousands years ago. We are playing with serious fire.

The Indians and Chinese are in this huge fight now to see who can get the most oil. We may be at a point of peak oil production. You may see $100 a barrel oil in the next two or three years, but what still is driving this globalization is the idea that is you cannot possibly get rich, stay rich and get richer if you don’t release more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That was true in the industrial era; it is simply factually not true. What is true is that the old energy economy is well organized, financed and connected politically. The new energy economy is underfinanced, under organized, entrepreneurial and in need of the type of research and development work that we routinely did when we were trying to sequence the human genome or go into space. But just with existing technologies for conservation and clean energy, we can more than meet the Kyoto protocols if we were remotely serious about the targets and in the process create jobs in the developed and developing world on a scale that is otherwise unimaginable to me. It is just a question of whether we accept this, but I can only tell you that I have studied this data seriously. I consider it an existential threat to your future.

The Energy Bullentin has another article, this one by Jan Lundberg, that talks about Peak Oil and the start of a long-delayed conversation on energy:

That’s conversation, not conservation. We’ll get the latter only if (1) we have the real conversation or (2) we get hit over the head with heavy pre-petrocollapse warnings. I’m glad to say that it’s not just the second factor shaping up.

Change is in the wind. However, the nation is dominated by small minds tied to the fossil-fueled status quo, instead of listening to big-picture energy analysts such as Congressman Roscoe Bartlett and consultant Robert Hirsch. These power-house scientists spoke at a Pentagon-sponsored presentation, "Energy: a Conversation about Our National Addiction" on April 24th within a stone’s throw of that five-sided building - ironic, as the Department of Defense is the single largest consumer of oil in the world. I attended this Energy Conversation and bring you, the concerned reader, a rundown of what was presented.

Many awareness-raising events concerned with peak oil and petrocollapse are taking place lately. The news media, mainly concerned with price sensation, are helping somewhat to awaken the oil-addicted population, albeit with narrower concerns than the End of the Oil Age. Recent headlines include "Beijing’s Pursuit of Oil" and "Consumers Face a New Reality." The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a peak oil resolution on April 11, 2006. It acknowledges the threats posed by peak oil and calls for the establishment of a city-wide study to assess San Francisco's vulnerability to peak oil.

At least George W. Bush opened some floodgates of attention this year by announcing the U.S. is "addicted to oil." He thus allowed others in government to come out of the woodwork on energy issues. This may be Bush II’s main legacy, as little and late as it was at this point in history. For those Americans that were still asleep, we are now all pretty much on the same page as to oil dependence and the likelihood of higher prices and tighter supply. It is time to turn the page and learn about such basics as energy production ratios (net energy), the liquid-fuel nature of the energy crisis, and the impossibility of delaying peak oil and its effects if we are indeed at the historic high of global extraction.

Honestly curing ourselves of addiction means we don’t try to maintain supply. Is that what we’d like to see for heroin addicts, to assure a "fair" price and fight for unlimited access? Just as with heroin, the only sensible course is to stop the habit. Get off petroleum starting now. Sorry, there’s no handy substitute - except culture change, as a lieutenant colonel enthusiastically told me.

Energy and oil are one of those issues Americans can't just leave to the experts and policy buffs. I don't know what the answers are yet and I feel I'm still learning the facts but we have spent far too much time ignoring energy and other related issues over the last twenty years. There are powerful forces in Washington and the media that were happy there was no dialogue. Without dialogue, there is no democracy. Let the dialogue begin.