Low-MPG Energy Policy

To hear President Bush tell it on Wednesday, had Congress passed his administration’s energy bill, SUV owners would be using spare change instead of retirement funds to fill their gas guzzlers’ tanks. But Bush’s defense of his troubled energy policy during a brief news conference doesn’t wash.

Start with the president’s claim that opening more of the Alaskan wilderness to drilling would have kept skyrocketing gasoline prices in check. Oil companies might be able to economically extract 3.2 billion barrels of oil from these pristine lands, but that’s only enough to satisfy U.S. demand for about six months, and it would take more than a decade for the oil to reach gas pumps. Tougher fuel-efficiency standards could save as much as 1.6 million barrels of oil a day, the equivalent of what the U.S. imports from Saudi Arabia.

Bush also chided Congress for failing to embrace his plan to cut dependence on foreign energy sources. Yet a recent three-part Times series confirms that it was Vice President Dick Cheney’s handpicked energy task force that sent the U.S. down a dangerous road in 2001 by advocating strengthened ties with oil-rich regimes in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and the Caspian region. Though Angola, Colombia, Kazakhstan and their neighbors are blessed with a wealth of oil, “The Politics of Petroleum” (www.latimes.com/oil) presents evidence that the oil revenues pouring into these countries are benefiting a small minority of wealthy people, increasing the gap between rich and poor and potentially sparking the instability the administration wants to prevent.

The series underscores the dangers of striking deals that serve the short-term interests of those regimes. American-trained troops in Colombia are defending an Occidental Petroleum pipeline and a rich oil field against rebels. Money generated by that pipeline has been used both to prop up Colombia’s military and, by way of local provinces, to buy weapons for left-wing guerrillas.

A massive influx of dollars in Angola is failing to create promised jobs, even as government corruption grows. The country ranks 164th out of 175 countries on a United Nations index that measures citizens’ quality of life. The Bush administration has awarded key trade concessions to oil-rich Kazakhstan by claiming significant improvements in its human rights, despite conclusions to the contrary by the State Department and other organizations.

Meanwhile, Cheney has dismissed conservation, the only sure way to reduce oil demand, as little more than “a possible sign of personal virtue.” Cheney’s faulty logic ignores the reality that conservation works. The U.S. economy is 50% more energy-efficient than it was in the 1970s because of tough conservation standards. Yet the Bush administration dragged its feet for three years before approving new efficiency standards for air conditioners and refuses to embrace more-stringent fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles and trucks.

The equation couldn’t be any simpler. Putting more fuel-efficient vehicles on the road would ease pressure on consumers’ pocketbooks as well as the need to side with regimes that risk creating the very problems that the United States wants to avoid.