I was so stunned that I couldn’t believe my eyes. This can’t be real, I thought. It has to be a hoax. Tomorrow is, after all, April 1st — what we in the U.S. call “April Fools” day — when pranks and hoaxes are commonly pulled. I’ve done it a couple times on EV World; once saying GM had decided to build an electric version of its Geo Tracker SUV and last year when I wrote that a fictitious company called Berkshire Halfway had bought us out for an undisclosed fortune and I “smiled all the way to the bank.”
But this report, purportedly from Platts (www.platts.com) saying that George Bush “wishes he had taken a different tack on climate change and energy policy when he came to office…” is simply too hard to believe. I have emailed Bill Loveless at Platts to confirm the authenticity of the document dated March 30, 2006.
[UPDATE: Bill Loveless confirms the report is real. See also official White House transcript below.]
In the article, Platts quotes the president as saying on Wednesday, “’I guess I should have started differently when I first became president and said we will invest in new technologies that will enable us to use fossil fuels in a much wiser way.’ The new technologies he referred to were ethanol and ‘hybrid batteries,’ as well as existing ones for coal and nuclear power.”
After delivering a speech at Freedom House, the president was asked about worldwide criticism of his administration’s stance on global warming and Kyoto. He responded, “I believe the best way to put technologies in place that will not only achieve national objectives, like less addiction to oil, but also help clean the air, is to be wealthy enough to invest in technologies, and then to share those technologies with parts of the world that were excluded from the Kyoto protocol.”
Platts noted that soon after taking office, Bush cancelled the Partnership for a New Generation Vehicle that was working on hybrid car technology in favor of hydrogen research. Since his 2006 State of the Union, he has been touting flexible-fuel, plug-in hybrids on almost every occasion.
After hearing the president’s remarks about plug-in hybrids, one EV World reader asked the reformed George Bush tongue-in-check , “Who are you and what have you done with the president”?
In the same March 30, 2006 issue of Platts Inside Energy Extra, is a report that the real cost of America’s annual oil addiction goes way beyond the price of a barrel of oil. In Senate testimony Wednesday, Milton Copulous of the National Defense Council Foundation placed the real cost at $825 billion.
Bill Moore:
Other news reports covering the same event at Freedom House noted that while Bush acknowledged global warming as real, he still thinks its a natural occurrence and not man-made…. so there is still an element of denial going on here.
31/Mar/2006
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Bill Moore:
Here is the official White House transcript of the question and Bush’s response:
Q From Australia. I’ve got a question about global warming — in the Australian Parliament, Tony Blair called for greater action. And this seems to be something that the U.S. President could make a major difference on. There’s a virtual consensus that the planet is warming. If you addressed issues like emissions, fuel efficiency, issues to do with alternative energy in your last few years as President, it could make a significant difference I think to the —
THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate you bringing that up.
Q — and I suppose I want to know, what is your plan?
THE PRESIDENT: Good. We — first of all, there is — the globe is warming. The fundamental debate: Is it manmade or natural. Put that aside. It is in our interests that we use technologies that will not only clean the air, but make us less dependent on oil. That’s what I said in my State of the Union the other day. I said, look — and I know it came as quite a shock to — for people to hear a Texan stand up and say, we’ve got a national problem, we’re addicted to oil. But I meant what I said.
Being addicted to oil is a problem for our economy. In a global economy, when burgeoning economies like India and China use more fossil fuels, it affects the price of gasoline here in America. In a world in which sometimes people have got the oil we need, or don’t like us — it’s kind of a undiplomatic way of putting it — it means we’ve got a national security issue.
I have — much of my position was defined early on in my presidency when I told the world I thought that Kyoto was a lousy deal for America. And I tell you why it was a lousy deal for America. It meant that we had to cut emissions below 1990 levels, which would have meant I would have presided over massive layoffs and economic destruction. I believe the best way to put technologies in place that will not only achieve national objectives like less addiction to oil, but also help clean the air, is to be wealthy enough to invest in technologies, and then to share those technologies with parts of the world that were excluded from the Kyoto Protocol.
And so I guess I should have started differently when I first became President, and said, we will invest in new technologies that will enable us to use fossil fuels in a much wiser way. And what does that mean? Well, it means that we’ve got to figure out how to use ethanol more in our cars. Ethanol is produced mainly by cane and corn. But we’re near some breakthroughs that we can use sawgrass and biomass to be able to produce ethanol
That means we got to continue investing in hybrid batteries. Ours is a country where many people live in urban centers, like Washington, D.C., and it’s possible to have a hybrid battery breakthrough which says that the first 40 miles of an automobile can be used by electricity alone. Right now the hybrid vehicles, as you know, switch between gasoline and electrical power. But that consumes gasoline, which means we’re still reliant upon oil. The idea is to get off of oil.
On the electricity front, we need to be using nuclear power more in this country, in my judgment. It is a renewable source of energy that has zero gas emissions. We’ve got a great natural resource here in America called coal. We have 250-plus years of coal reserves. But we also recognize that by — burning coal causes environmental problems, and so we’re spending billions on research to come up with clean coal technologies. And we’d like to share those technologies with other nations of the world that are beginning to grow so that they are good stewards of the environment, as well.
And so I got a comprehensive plan that uses technologies to help this nation from a national and economic perspective, but also will help improve the global economy — the environment from those new, burgeoning economies that are — like China and India, to be exact.
31/Mar/2006
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