OPEC Digs In. Administration Backs Off.
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Environment, Foreign Policy, Money, The War On TerrorismWell, that was certainly short lived.
Bush said that we needed to cut our addiction to oil in the SOTU speech, OPEC complained yesterday and today we have the Administration saying, “Well, what we really meant was…”
WASHINGTON - 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.
Didn’t mean it literally? Umm, I find that extremely hard to believe. I guess I’d like to know exactly what he meant figuratively then…
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.
Wait, don’t we import the most oil from Canada? Why yes…we do.
Hmm, so Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman…was Bush’s talk of the Middle East purely an example?
“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.
Ah-ha…so he wanted it to appear that he was being tough on Islamic nations when he was really being anything but since plans that stretch out till 2025 could easily be changed at a moment’s notice, Got it.
But still, this does means we’ll be importing less oil, right?
“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.
Three words people: coal to gas.
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2006 and is filed under Environment, Foreign Policy, Money, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 2nd, 2006 at 11:22 am
Totally Pathetic. I knew he was full of it.
February 2nd, 2006 at 12:48 pm
To revisit Bush’s own “addiction” analogy, it’s like going to your neighborhood pusher, but instead of buying more drugs from him like you usually do, you tell him you’re going in for treatment. How would you expect the pusher to react?
February 2nd, 2006 at 2:28 pm
Joshua, his own advisors are saying, “Well, he didn’t mean it.” Seriously, what did OPEC do except say something stern? Aren’t we the only remaining superpower? Apparently there are some people who are more powerful…
February 2nd, 2006 at 10:32 pm
coal to gas? I don’t know - I’d rather we cut way back on fossil fuels, and start cutting back on those greenhouse gases.
Four words - nuclear power, electric vehicles.
The super charged hybrids look like the wave of the near-term future to me: Plug it in at night, and have enough juice for a typical daily commute. And if you end up driving more than that, the gas engine starts to pick up the slack.
The smart guys in the administration realize that as long as we use oil, we’re going to use middle eastern oil. Why? Because it has the lowest cost of production. Which production would go first? The oil sands up north in Canada, which is about the most expensive oil produced in the world. That’s why they backed off the statement.