The Administration's Energy Policy Remains a Disgrace

That would be the centrist/conservative Economist magazine (which I'm happy to say I've finally gotten back via subscription after an olde gift sub lagged for awhile; it's a tad expensive but worth it). While the magazine lauds President Bush's choice of words from the SOTU address last week--mimicing a cover story from back in 2001 (here's the link if you have a subscription)--it finds them rather hollow:

Look closely, though, and it turns out that this grand new plan to end oil addiction is really no such thing. Take, for a start, that objective of replacing three-quarters of Middle Eastern imports of oil by 2025. Because oil is a fungible, globally-traded commodity, it does not matter where imports come from. Even if America got all its oil from Canada, Venezuela and Nigeria, an oil shock in Saudi Arabia would send the price of every barrel of oil skyrocketing—even Alaskan barrels. Only abandoning foreign oil completely would free America from the prospect of an oil shock.

The problem is not that the technologies identified by Mr Bush are necessarily the wrong ones. Quite the contrary. Some of the approaches he points to, such as “plug-in” hybrid cars and “cellulosic” ethanol, are quite promising.

The problems with Mr Bush's speech are the same ones that undermined his energy policy, which was passed into law as the Energy Act last year. That grotesque law handed out tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to every imaginable source of energy. But it did nothing to promote carbon trading; it did not mention carbon taxes; it had no tightening of vehicle fuel-economy rules.

In short, Mr Bush is still avoiding most of the regulations that might actually encourage the market to ditch dirty technologies in favour of clean ones. And he is still avoiding any attempt to make Americans pay the true cost of the energy they guzzle. Until that happens, he is firmly on the side of the pusher, not the addict.

I heartily agree.