Addicted to Oil

Surely, this is some kind of joke. It certainly will be tonight on Jon Stewart's show, you better believe.

Bush’s Mideast oil vow not meant literally

By KEVIN G. HALL
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON — In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Bush vowed to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025.

His energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president did not mean it literally.

What Bush meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025. But America still would import oil from the Middle East because that is where the greatest oil supplies are.

Bush’s reference to Mideast oil made headlines because of his assertion that “America is addicted to oil” and his call to “break this addiction.” He vowed to fund research into better batteries for hybrid vehicles and more production of the alternative fuel ethanol, setting a lofty goal of replacing “more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.”

He pledged to “move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.”

“This was purely an example,” Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.
He said the broad goal is to displace foreign oil imports, from anywhere, with domestic alternatives. He acknowledged oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms. Consequently, it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth.

Asked why the president used the words “the Middle East” when he didn’t really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that “every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands.”
Imports account for about 60 percent of U.S. oil consumption.