The Outrage...Oil Addiction Edition

Many of us found it really strange that a President who was hopelessly addicted to the money and power of big oil will tell us that we should do something about our addiction to oil. Of course we latter found out he was only kidding. We also thought it was strange that a President who has done everything he could to stop research on alternate fuels would tell us we needed to spend more money on researching them. Of course he was kidding again and actually plans to cut personnel from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The Energy Department will begin laying off researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the next week or two because of cuts to its budget.

A veteran researcher said the staff had been told that the cuts would be concentrated among researchers in wind and biomass, which includes ethanol. Those are two of the technologies that Mr. Bush cited on Tuesday night as holding the promise to replace part of the nation's oil imports.

The budget for the laboratory, which is just west of Denver, was cut by nearly 15 percent, to $174 million from $202 million, requiring the layoff of about 40 staff members out of a total of 930, said a spokesman, George Douglas. The cut is for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1.

Well the Washington Post has done a nice job of putting all the Bush bull shit into one steaming bucket.

"AMERICA IS addicted to oil." It was a catchy line in President Bush's State of the Union speech. But in truth, few administrations have done more to feed America's oil addiction than this one -- and the same can be said for this Republican Congress.

For most of Mr. Bush's first term, Congress struggled to pass an energy bill. Last year, Mr. Bush signed one into law. Although not as riddled with pork as some previous versions, the law did not change much, either. It provided subsidies for research on some of the alternative technologies the president referred to in his speech, such as clean coal, ethanol, wind, solar and nuclear power. But it also provided billions of dollars in new subsidies for gas and oil, including inducements to drill for more.


Moreover, as the bill wound its way through Congress, the White House rejected a number of measures that might have eased America's addiction. It quashed, for example, the creation of a national "renewable portfolio standard" that would have required utilities to get a certain percentage of their energy from renewable sources, something several states have adopted. It rejected an "oil savings amendment," which would have required successive administrations to find ways to reduce oil use. It spurned any suggestion of automobile fuel efficiency requirements.

Nor did the White House or Congress ever consider imposing a carbon tax, the most straightforward solution possible: Indeed, if one had been imposed five years ago and consumers had been paying higher oil and gas prices as a result, some of the technologies now under discussion might already be on the market thanks to entrepreneurs, not government funding. But this president has never been interested in changing consumer behavior. On the contrary, when asked at a 2001 news conference whether Americans needed to do anything about their high energy consumption, his then-spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said, "The president believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life."

It would appear that this administration is not out to protect "the American way of life" but to protect the bottom line of Exxon-Mobile. Save your watches, the BS is flowing fast and deep.