Focus on Oil Praised, but With Caveats

In declaring in his State of the Union address that America is “addicted to oil” and pledging bold action to find alternative fuel sources, especially for automobiles, President Bush adopted rhetoric that had previously been heard more often from environmentalists than from the White House.

Many analysts welcomed Bush’s change of tone as a sign of rising awareness of how serious U.S. dependence on imported oil had become. Not only are the prices of gasoline and other petroleum products high and expected to remain so in the future, but global oil supplies are unusually tight in relation to overall production.

That means any future disruption, such as new storm damage to production facilities in the Gulf of Mexico or unrest in the Middle East, could have outsized economic and even political effects, experts said.

Although the new emphasis on attacking the oil problem was widely seen as encouraging -- especially from a president with long-standing ties to the petroleum industry -- analysts warned that it would take more than a shift in rhetoric or new research funds to produce significant changes.

The U.S. dependence on oil is deeply rooted in government policies, the economy, national infrastructure and consumer habits. Unless Bush puts forward dramatic initiatives that alter the basic landscape, which now favors gasoline-powered automobiles, substantive change may be many years away, experts said.

“Oil is very deeply entrenched in our economy,” said Peter Tertzakian, author of “A Thousand Barrels a Second: The Coming Oil Break Point and the Challenges Facing an Energy Dependent World.” “And every year, we consume more and more oil, and it becomes more and more entrenched.”

Moreover, Bush’s specific proposals were relatively modest in dollar terms.

“He’s thinking the right things, but it’s kind of like John Kennedy announcing we’re going to go into space and we’ve got $1 billion to do it,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy specialist at Rice University’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. With such a limited commitment, she said, “we’d never have gotten to the moon.”

For example, the $148 million pledged for Bush’s Solar America initiative is dwarfed by a California program approved last month that commits nearly $3 billion for solar power installations over 11 years.

Democrats and other administration critics, calling Bush’s speech hypocritical, noted that the president had repeatedly opposed efforts to mandate greater energy conservation, particularly higher gasoline mileage standards for the auto industry.

He has also pushed hard for expanding domestic oil production. And, though the State of the Union speech contained no reference to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday that the administration remained committed to opening the reserve to oil and gas drilling.

Speaking by telephone with conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, Cheney said the plan to drill in the Arctic was “not off the table by any means.”

Cheney, who came under fire early in Bush’s first term for holding closed-door meetings with industry lobbyists while formulating energy legislation, said the president opted not to mention the Arctic proposal because he “took a long-term view here, reaching out as much as 20 years in terms of the effort to reduce our imports.”

Rather than mandate energy savings, Bush stayed with the basic approach of his administration, which opposes dictating to private industry.

In last year’s energy bill, for example, the White House opposed a provision to cut back oil consumption by 1 million barrels a day by 2015.

Instead, administration officials said, automakers and other manufacturers would voluntarily turn to alternative fuels and more energy-efficient products when market forces made it profitable for them to do so.

That approach is too slow, critics said. They pointed out that Bush had given little attention to what many experts considered an indispensable element in any program to cut dependence on foreign oil: conservation.

“He didn’t propose anything having to do with energy efficiency, which is something that could help in the next 10 years, while he’s developing all these new technologies,” Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “How about making our vehicles more efficient? He didn’t mention one thing about that.”

Failure to reduce consumption is likely to take a continuing toll on consumers and the economy, experts said.

“Energy prices are not only high right now. Many people believe they’re going to stay high in historical terms for a very long time,” said Paul Bledsoe, spokesman for the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan group of energy experts.

Recent reports of record-high profits in the oil industry, soaring costs for winter heating and consistently high pump prices are combining to turn energy into a thorny political issue, after years of calm prices.

“The White House discovered what we’ve known for some time. This is a huge issue with the American people,” said Mark S. Mellman, a Democratic pollster.

There were signs Wednesday that the message had reached Republicans in Congress.

“We intend to do something about” rising prices to consumers, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said at a hearing into whether oil industry mergers in recent years had made gasoline more expensive at the pump.

“It just may be time to legislate in this field,” Specter said.

Asked why the plan did not call for sacrifice, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said that people already were paying a heavy price at the pump and that the best answers would come from private enterprise rather than from government mandates.

“The way I view it, there’s plenty of sacrifice to go around,” he said.

“The issue is how do we deal with it.”

To some, the most promising among the energy options highlighted by Bush were biofuels, a group of organic blends meant to substitute for gasoline and diesel, in whole or in part.

“What he talked about in terms of alternative fuels and the options and the investment is very much in sync with what is doable and what is embraceable by the industry,” said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich.

“We have the capability to use a great many more of these biofuels, which can be made from everything from sugar cane to wood chips,” he said. “It’s just a matter of chemistry.”

*

Times staff writer Peter Wallsten contributed to this report.