Back in January, in his State of the Union address, President Bush shocked his base by admitting the obvious: “America is addicted to oil … often imported from unstable parts of the world.”
It made headlines, but the facts were old news. America, with 5 percent of the world’s population, uses 25 percent of its oil, more than half of that imported. Most of that is burned in our gas-guzzling vehicles.
In March, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said, “For all our military might and economic dominance, the Achilles’ heel of the most powerful country on Earth is still the oil we cannot live without.”
Besides the national security issues raised by President Bush and Sen. Obama, there are environmental and economic reasons to address our oil addiction.
Air pollution from vehicles is linked to respiratory problems, heart and lung diseases, cancer and premature death. Global warming threatens incalculable harm. A quarter of all greenhouse gases produced annually by the U.S. come out of our tailpipes. All alternative fuels burn clearer and reduce greenhouse gases compared to oil.
While the current “go yellow” ethanol push is getting attention, particularly from distressed farmers, ethanol produced from corn is no panacea. Corn production involves its own petroleum inputs for fertilizer and to run farm machinery. More important, throughout much of the arid West corn production is based on unsustainable ground-water pumping, such as that depleting our Ogalala Aquifer. The better solution is to produce ethanol, not from a subsidized crop we already have too much of, but from agricultural waste and other biomass sources, that “switch grass” the president mentioned in his State of the Union.
Meanwhile, advanced electric batteries are being developed in Boulder. The environmental and economic benefits of alternative fuels are clear.
So what to do about our oil addiction? The president has a plan: the Advanced Energy Initiative. Congress has others: In March, Sens. Obama and Richard Lugar, R-Ind., introduced the bipartisan American Fuels Act of 2006. This summer, Colorado’s Sen. Ken Salazar co-sponsored another bipartisan effort called the Vehicle and Fuel Choices for American Security Act.
All of these initiatives set goals. President Bush wants to replace 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. Obama and Lugar want to produce 250 million gallons of ethanol from biomass, not corn, by 2012. Salazar wants a goal of obtaining 25 percent of our nation’s energy supply from renewable sources by 2025.
We have been here before. Fourteen years ago, after the first Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush also discovered our oil addiction. He signed the Energy Policy Act of 1992, and announced a “comprehensive national energy policy that gradually and steadily increases U.S. energy security in cost-effective and environmentally beneficial ways.”
He also set goals: replace 10 percent of our national oil used for transportation by 2000 and 30 percent by 2010 with alternative fuels.
It didn’t work, but why? It took two lawsuits by environmental organizations, one resolved in 2002 and the other earlier this year, to get the government to begin complying with the 1992 statute. In the first, the judge found, “for the most part, the government has failed to live up to its duties under the Act.” In the second, the judge ordered the government to reset its now unrealistic original goals. The government’s pending proposal: replace 30 percent of our oil used for transportation by 2030, kicking the oil can decades down the road.
The obvious criticism of all this future goal-setting is the failure to heed Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice: “In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.” As Sen. Salazar observes, Brazil substitutes ethanol produced from sugar cane waste for more than 40 percent of its gasoline today. Can’t we at least catch up with Brazil before 2030?
Goal-setting is great, but realistic plans to reach those goals are better. The biggest issue not on the table in the energy debate is conservation. Replacing oil with alternative fuel addresses half the problem. The other is to use less oil. The average American car is currently required to get a little over 20 miles per gallon, but 40 mpg is possible. Voila, we save half the oil.
The president has taken only the first step on the addict’s path to recovery, recognizing the addiction. The harder steps are yet to come, and merely setting goals is not going to get us there.
Jay Tutchton (jtutchton@law.du.edu) is director of the environmental law clinic at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law.
