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The new Bush energy plan: "Get more addicted to oil."
Readers of past dwahzon's village posts will know that I don't think much of Thomas Friedman's reasoning ability or rather his ability to ignore large parts of reality in coming up with some of his columns. But this time he got it right.
Two years ago, President Bush declared that America was "addicted to oil," and, by gosh, he was going to do something about it. Well, now he has. Now we have the new Bush energy plan: "Get more addicted to oil."
Actually, it's more sophisticated than that: Get Saudi Arabia, our chief oil pusher, to up our dosage for a little while and bring down the oil price just enough so the renewable energy alternatives can't totally take off. Then try to strong arm Congress into lifting the ban on drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
It's as if our addict-in-chief is saying to us: "C'mon guys, you know you want a little more of the good stuff. One more hit, baby. Just one more toke on the ole oil pipe. I promise, next year, we'll all go straight. I'll even put a wind turbine on my presidential library. But for now, give me one more pop from that drill, please, baby. Just one more transfusion of that sweet offshore crude."
It is hard for me to find the words to express what a massive, fraudulent, pathetic excuse for an energy policy this is. But it gets better.
He goes onto to mention the faux deadline that Bush has touted and Bush's complete lack of support for a bill "which extends for another eight years the investment tax credit for installing solar energy and extends for one year the production tax credit for producing wind power and for three years the credits for geothermal, wave energy and other renewables", H.R. 6049 -- "The Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008".
People forget, wind and solar power are here, they work, they can go on your roof tomorrow. What they need now is a big U.S. market where lots of manufacturers have an incentive to install solar panels and wind turbines -- because the more they do, the more these technologies would move down the learning curve, become cheaper and be able to compete directly with coal, oil and nuclear, without subsidies.
That seems to be exactly what the Republican Party is trying to block, since the Senate Republicans -- sorry to say, with the help of John McCain -- have now managed to defeat the renewal of these tax credits six different times.
Then Tom goes onto conclude with what we need:
But our future is not in oil, and a real president wouldn't be hectoring Congress about offshore drilling today. He'd be telling the country a much larger truth:
"Oil is poisoning our climate and our geopolitics, and here is how we're going to break our addiction: We're going to set a floor price of $4.50 a gallon for gasoline and $100 a barrel for oil. And that floor price is going to trigger massive investments in renewable energy -- particularly wind, solar panels and solar thermal. And we're also going to go on a crash program to dramatically increase energy efficiency, to drive conservation to a whole new level and to build more nuclear power. And I want every Democrat and every Republican to join me in this endeavor."
Precisely. Tom, I have to give credit where credit is due; better late than never. Though I want to also point out that we would have had that president in 2000 if the Supreme Court had stayed out of meddling in politics and the votes for Al Gore in Florida had been counted.
H/T to taonow
