Americans are growing anxious over the record cost of gasoline, and US President George W. Bush is under pressure to take action to ease prices.
Though the average price of a liter of gasoline in the US is still far below what Europeans and drivers in other parts of the world pay, it's still hurting Americans every time they fill up their tanks. The price of gasoline was up about 16 percent from a year ago, according to the American Automobile Association's March survey, and Americans are looking to their government for some relief. But Bush's speech last week on his energy policy provided no groundbreaking strategies, the president's critics say.
Bush proposed increasing the amount of oil and natural gas produced in the US and he suggested the country burn more coal cleanly to produce electricity in order to reduce US dependence on crude-oil imports. Clean technologies are needed because most US coal is high in sulphur and creates more air pollution when it is burned.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
To break the bottleneck in worldwide oil production, Bush said new oil refineries should be constructed on US military bases that are no longer in use.
"We've got a fundamental question we got to face here in America," Bush said. "Do we want to continue to grow more dependent on other nations to meet our energy needs? Or do we need to do what is necessary to achieve greater control of our economic destiny?"
Bush also asked countries whose economies are expanding rapidly, China and India in particular, to do their part in reducing consumption. In addition, he appealed for new sources of electric energy to power cars, such as hybrid engines and hydrogen fuel cells, and said new technologies should be developed that shrink a car's fuel needs.
Bush's proposals have been met with little enthusiasm. His speech was criticized for serving up warmed-over ideas. Senate minority leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, said the policies include neither a remedy for the current energy crisis nor a way out of the stranglehold of foreign-oil imports.
Americans consume about one-quarter of the world's oil production, and on a per capita basis consume about double the amount Europeans use, according to government statistics. Despite these facts, Bush avoided confronting the American public with a lecture about the need to conserve energy in the face of depleting fossil fuel reserves.
Government standards for energy efficiency have immediate effect, but are "politically costly," Amy Myers Jaffe of Rice University in Houston, Texas, told the Washington Post.
The oil industry also reacted skeptically to Bush's speech. After three decades without building a new oil refinery, it is in no way certain that the industry will want to build any new ones, the Post said.
USA Today quoted environmental lobbyist David Hamilton, who wonders if the current shortage of refinery capacity was an intentional decision of the oil industry in the 1990s to reduce supplies and thereby increase profits.
The nuclear-energy industry has also had reservations about building new facilities, even though the government has offered millions of dollars in guarantees to protect the first four plants that are built from potential losses caused by construction delays.
Investors are wary because of the high costs of building nuclear power plants compared with the costs of other energy production, the Post wrote.
The Los Angeles Times said Bush used the speech to tell the American public that he is feeling stung by the high price of gas.
But on the other side, the newspaper pointed out that Bush is a market-oriented president who worked in the oil industry and who hesitates to put forth solutions that amount to a great deal of federal interference in it.
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