Mercury News: Bush’s energy strategy holds little for California. More broadly, the White House believes the proposals to increase supply and improve electricity and natural-gas distribution are the keys to helping California and the rest of the country deal with energy problems. The 163-page proposal says the United States is facing “the most serious energy shortage since the oil embargoes of the 1970s.”
On one point, the Bush people are correct. This is not a short-term problem in many ways — though the price gouging by the energy companies selling power to California’s utilities is distinctly a temporary situation.
The plan’s nearly total dismissal of conservation and alternative energy sources is a return to the bad old days of drill and burn economics. Actually, it’s worse. We have the technology in place to drastically reduce consumption of traditional resources, but this plan deliberately ignores them.
Bush and his cronies come from the energy industry. They were put into power, in part, by their colleagues in that business. Now they’re coming to the trough, aided by an artificially created crisis, to put the screws to the rest of us.
Among the most depressing parts of this plan is its abandonment of the environment. Bush’s active hostility to environmental protection — Texas has some of the worst pollution in the nation, and that’s not a coincidence — shines through the prose here
The administration would spend billions of taxpayers’ money on everything but what counts — getting us off of non-renewable energy resources and into clean, renewable ones, and conservation. The power plant you don’t have to build is ultimately a much cheaper source of power than the one you do. These people know this, but they don’t care.