Bush to Push Americans to Cut Energy Usage

This is most unexpected, though most welcome: the Bush Administration will unveil a national campaign to convince Americans to curb their energy usage as much as possible this winter. And this after Bush's own father famously told the world in 1992 at the World Summit in Brazil, "The American way of life is not up for negotiation."

This is not the first time that Bush has shown his new, enlightened stance on a possible fossil fuel crisis. Two months ago, with oil prices shooting upwards, he talked about how we needed to focus seriously on alternative fuel sources.

While this lip service is reassuring (in that a "good ol' boy from the oilpatch" can come around on energy issues enough to admit that a problem exists), I am afraid that it is just that: lip service. Bush (or his handlers) is quite politically adroit, and once it became clear that Americans were upset about high gasoline prices hitting them in the pocketbook, a new strategy for talking about energy was drafted.

If Bush was serious about this, why is alternative fuel research not being funded? Surely a small slice of the $500 billion defence budget would go a long way toward financing some of the cutting edge research that is going on at a handful of US universities. And energy technology would seem to be related enough to defence to get some DARPA money.