The US' energy woes

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The US' energy woes

Rolling blackouts and rising gasoline prices are going to pose a serious problem for US President George Bush, who looks poised to fail the big energy test

By Huck Gutman No one has accused US President George Bush, who likes short work days and long naps, of being overly energetic. But not long after the milestone of his first one hundred days in office has passed, a different sort of energy situation is about to engulf his Presidency. America is facing energy woes. Last winter California, the nation's most populous state, faced a number of rolling blackouts as electricity demand outpaced electricity supply. Predictions are for increased brownout/blackout periods this summer, perhaps as high as fifteen hours a week in most households. As California has been the trendsetter in so many other areas, so with electricity: rolling blackouts are now seen as a strong possibility in many of the nation's geographic regions.`Can Bush ignore [his] oil background in order to serve the people's interest? Of course. Will he? Absolutely, positively, not.'

This situation poses a very large problem for Bush. He believes in the free market, which means even as evidence of price-gouging by electricity vendors is verified, he asserts that only competition can rein in spiraling energy prices. (Rates in California have gone up by 50 percent, with further rate increases predicted.) He hates, he positively abhors, the idea of price controls.

Additionally, he has strong ties to energy companies, especially as many of the large profitable vendors come from his home state of Texas. He -- or at least his voluble vice president, Dick Cheney, who has been making speeches on this very subject -- does not believe that energy conservation can do much to lessen demand.

So Bush is stuck with the position that doing nothing to alleviate current hardships is the best course: he insists that even if electricity rates double and electricity becomes unavailable for hours a day, only building new power plants, new nuclear generation plants, and stringing huge amounts of new cable will solve the problem.

Politicians learn to their dismay that ignoring the current problems of the electorate is a recipe for disaster. Telling Californians to wait for three or four years, when their businesses shut down, their homes go without electricity, their jobs disappear and their lives are disrupted in all sots of ways, is not going to work. Bush is in for big trouble.

The political difficulties over energy facing Bush are worse than just described. For if Americans are dependent on electricity, they are passionate about automobiles. Americans have a love affair with their cars. This is not news: a sizeable percentage of global pollution and global warming is caused by this strange American passion, one that the citizenry of the US just will not abandon. In recent weeks gasoline prices have been zooming, up between sixteen and fifty percent depending on region. (Prices have gone up most in the Midwest.)

There is every indication that the prices will rise considerably higher in the next several months, for Americans drive more in the summer. When the weather turns good in cold regions, when workers have their holidays, the love affair between Americans and their cars blossoms profusely. From going for a drive for the sheer pleasure of being on the road, to going to the lake or mountains for a picnic, to going on vacation, Americans pile into their cars and drive in huge numbers.

Thus, while gasoline is in short supply, demand is about to escalate. Again, President Bush has no solution -- other than drilling for oil in the pristine wilderness in Alaska and saying, "Wait for four or five years until new refineries are built."

But so dependent is the nation on gasoline, not only for personal pleasure but for the movement of goods and the movement of workers to their jobs, that inflation in the price of gas will set off an inflationary spiral throughout the economy.

Driving a car will be more expensive, as will taking a plane. Food prices will escalate since most food is shipped long distances by truck; in fact, all products will rise in price since all goods move along gasoline-powered pathways.

And with rising gasoline prices Bush really has a problem. He is, after all, an "Oil President." His economic background, as was his father's before him, is in Texas oil. His friends are Texas oilmen. His vice president was a major oil-exploration company executive before he was tapped to run with Bush. Their campaign was funded, to the extent of many millions of dollars, by oil money: Over sixty million dollars flowed from the oil interests into Republican Party coffers in the last election.

Can Bush ignore this oil background in order to serve the people's interest? Of course. Will he? Absolutely, positively, not. There is no way the "Oil President" will abandon his old buddies, his financial supporters, his connections, his own personal economic interests.

Bush's problem is, of course, that Americans do not want to pay higher prices for gasoline, especially when prices at the pump double. At the same time Americans know full well that Bush and Cheney come from a Big Oil background. It doesn't take a sophisticated analyst to tell that higher gasoline prices, while they may devastate most working Americans, are a boon to the oil industry. When their wallets and pocketbooks are emptied just to gas up the family car, even working people who voted for Bush will concede that he is more concerned about his buddies in the oil industry than he is about the household budgets of American workers and their families.

Electricity prices, gasoline prices, are in a major upward spiral -- yet Bush has no desire to find short term solutions.

There are solutions which would bring immediate relief, such as federal planning of energy resource allocation, price controls, taxes on windfall profits, and energy conservation. It seems increasingly likely that energy will be Bush's first real test in office, and that, in the view of the American populace, he will fail that test.

The voting public, who go to the polls in a year and a half for Congressional elections, will be reminded of his failure every time they pull into a gas station to fill their tank. They will confront his failure every time their lights, television, and air conditioning go off for several hours in rolling blackouts.

It will be a long and difficult summer, not only to those who drive automobiles or expect their lights and appliances to work twenty-four hours a day, but for the man in the White House. His first real large test is upon him, and it looks like he is going to fail it -- to fail it, as the young in America say, big time.

Huck Gutman is the author, with Representative Bernard Sanders, of Outsider in the House as well as three other books.

URL=[http://www.taipeitimes.com/news/2001/06/19/story/0000090656]

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), June 19, 2001

Answers

So Huck Gutman, an associate of Vermont's only Socialist U.S. Rep, Bernie Sanders, thinks this whole energy mess can be laid at the feet of George W. Bush, who has been in office just five months.

Does Mr. Gutman think a crash program to build solar panels and windmill farms is a better solution than getting the oil and natural gas, of which we already have plenty, from the ground, and into processing channels, of which we also have plenty?

When I read socialist claptrap like this it makes me sick to my stomach. Talk about pie in the sky. It would also be nice if elephants could fly. Maybe he should get his buddy, Sanders, to pass a Congressional Resolution to that effect. That will solve the problem.

-- Wellesley (wellesley@freeport.net), June 19, 2001.


I would like to remind everyone that daddy Bush was not I repeat not an oil man. All daddy Bush did while working in the oil industry was steal oil leases in Midland Tx. Daddy Bush is a professional politician. Now George W has not brought in 1 oil field. And far as that nincompoop Cheney, he is a professional politician working for Halliburton, the company that bank rolled LBJ. Daddy Bush, B Clinton, and Jimmy Carter are all tangled up in that BCCI mess. So we have scum bags working for scum companies.

-- David Williams (DAVIDWILL@prodigy.net), June 19, 2001.

daddy bush was a CIA man - his oil business was likely a cover story

nevertheless, the bush clan is deeply mired in the fossil fuel industry

if we had any brains, we'd be mandating hyper conservation while those solar panels and windfarms get installed

GM developed a car in the 1980s that gets 110 mpg - yet you cannot buy it. It's not a "hybrid," merely the engine was redesigned (it's also smaller than an SUV, but it's not a go-kart).

No one gave North Americans the right to waste the fossil fuels created over a hundred million years -- and we probably deserve the mess that will happen when they start to run out.

Shortsighted demands that extraction rates be increased merely makes the day of reckoning sooner -- and more painful.

Buying larger pants won't solve obesity.

-- mark (mrobinowitz@igc.org), June 20, 2001.


Yuh, when it takes a 36 square mile solar panel to equal the energy production of one nuclear plant, that sounds like a quick answer to the problem.

-- Uncle Fred (dogboy45@bigfoot.com), June 20, 2001.

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