Rhinocrisy

Listen to the words. The strong, determined words of U.S. President George Walker Bush, speaking on energy.

We must address the root causes that are driving up gas prices.

In the past decade, America’s energy consumption has been growing about 40 times faster than our energy production. That means we’re relying more on energy produced abroad.

To reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy, we must take four key steps.

First, we must better use technology to become better conservers of energy.

What he called the House’s “good energy bill” eliminates most of Bush’s proposed energy efficiency funding.

And secondly, we must find innovative and environmentally sensitive ways to make the most of our existing energy resources, including oil, natural gas, coal and safe, clean nuclear power.

The only environmentally sensitive way to make the most of existing enregy sources is to not use them. And if “safe, clean nuclear power” is an existing energy source, I hope Mr. Bush will submit this news to a peer-reviewed journal, because it’s big news.

Third, we must develop promising new sources of energy, such as hydrogen, ethanol or bio-diesel.

Dude - I realize you’re a guy who ends a press conference by saying to the assembled reporters, “thank you for your answers.” But still, I need to say: hydrogen is not an energy source, it’s a storage medium which will most likely be used to store fossil fuel energy. Ethanol is not a new energy source, and while the debate rages (and this link goes to someone with serious oil industry connections), ethanol may well be an energy sink. And bio-diesel is better than the others, but if it’s going to be used for any significant fraction of our energy needs, that’s going to require even more land going into soybean cultivation — and the concominant use of fossil water, which is not a renewable resource. (Or, we could do what we did in early 2004, and start importing soybeans. Wouldn’t that be cool.)

Fourth, we must help growing energy consumers overseas, like China and India, apply new technologies to use energy more efficiently and reduce global demand of fossil fuels.

I love this one. Criminy — we have these brilliant scientists at our Dept of Energy labs who have spent their lives devising ways to save energy. But because the government’s prime directive is to provide the base with its viscous bodily fluids, these scientists mostly get to talk to one another and enjoy the view. Now, good news! Bush is going to send them to help China. Where, one can expect, they will have all the influence of, say, the dozen or so urbanist delegations to China, the human-rights promoters, or best of all, the Taiwanese “pissing in the wind” against the Chinese “anti-secession law.”

Oh I’m sorry, am I being a “filter?” Well that’s ok, because Bush was on in prime time. So don’t listen to the filter. Just listen to the words.

PS: Oh I’m sorry, did I neglect to mention that that same TV program recently wrapped up all the oil news you could possibly need.

Posted on Friday, April 29th, 2005 at 7:09 am | Uncategorized | feed | reply | trackback