Resting snugly within a laundry list of initiatives to increase the United States' economic competitiveness, President Bush called the nation on our addiction to oil. The roughly two minutes spent discussing energy policy in Tuesday's State of the Union Address, though, leaves me feeling skeptical about the administration's commitment to the real energy reform that is needed to address this huge environmental, political and social problem.
The president, true to form, failed to mention the growing concern about global warming among a majority of citizens, researchers and governments, and the increasingly obvious link between climatic change and human behavior. Instead, he chose to focus on the political and national security implications of fueling our economy on products produced in unstable regions of the world. Of course this part of the equation is true, but failing to recognize and deal with the environmental consequences of our addiction as well as the political ones leaves us examining solutions that cannot be sustainable in the long run.
Bush's plan is to confront our addition to oil with technology, what he calls 'incredible advances.' These advances include zero-emission coal-fired plants, solar and wind energy and nuclear power. Additionally, for our cars, he calls for developing hydrogen power and 'practical and competitive' ethanol production within six years. Ultimately, his goal is to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.
Let's start with coal, the other fossil fuel. Currently, about 50 percent of the electricity in the United States comes from coal, and burning it cleaner would have environmental benefits, particularly reducing greenhouse gasses and toxic chemicals, like mercury, that get into our air and water. Coal, though, is a finite and limited resource just like oil. Already having tapped all of the easily accessible coal near the surface, a lot of our coal now comes from destroying mountains in Appalachia, leading to environmental and social consequences for the people that live there.
Solar and wind are great technologies, but, for the time being, are inefficient and uneconomical on a large scale. In Wisconsin, for example, we just don't have enough sun and wind to feed all of the energy needs of our state given the current technology. These alternative ways of producing energy should be improved and developed, but aren't likely to be done to the necessary scale with the president's lackluster initiatives, which don't provide enough funding to bring these technologies up to speed.
Another option put forth, nuclear power, is clean and safe, as long as your definition of clean doesn't involve toxic byproducts that stick around for a long, long time. Also, in this increasingly paranoiac time of terrorist threats, should we really be increasing our use of materials that potentially could be used in a dirty bomb and building more lethal targets in the form of reactors? So nuclear isn't really all that safe, either, it seems.
Hydrogen fuel looks promising, and more research in this area should be done. More important, though, is for our government to support a huge initiative that changes the fuel infrastructure to allow for delivery of hydrogen, something that doesn't seem to be under serious consideration within the walls of the White House. Ethanol is a substitute for oil but takes 29 percent more energy to produce than it replaces, something that could be a concern for hydrogen as well. It doesn't seem to make sense as a cornerstone of the national energy policy but has huge political support from corn growers.
In the end, the biggest flaw of the president's speech, and a characteristic of the obstacles the administration has thrown up against real reform throughout his presidency, is the failure to address the true cause of our addiction: We use too much fuel. The real solution to the global energy crisis is not just a matter of switching from one form to another, but of reducing our reliance on fossil fuels overall. For the long term, this means changing the behavior of consumers dramatically across the world, including those in newly industrializing nations such as China and India, but mostly in the developed nations such as the United States, which consumes far too much oil for our population.
For the short term, the president should put his money where his mouth is and support increased fuel standards for automobiles. He also needs to make energy policy a real priority for the nation'not just by tossing some token tidbits to citizens in the State of the Union, but by funding substantial change in the way our nation thinks about and uses oil, and by engaging the world community in a real effort to reduce emissions and oil consumption.
