February 05, 2006

"Addicted to Oil"

George Will nails it:

The president's headline-grabbing assertion that America is "addicted" to oil is wonderfully useless. If it means only -- and what else can it mean? -- that in the near term we will urgently need a lot of oil, it is banal. The amusingly discordant word "addicted" couched censoriousness -- the president as national scold; our use of oil as somehow irresponsible -- in the vocabulary of addiction, which is the therapeutic language of Oprah Nation.

Not to worry. The president says that by 2025 America will "replace" -- a certain ambiguity there -- "more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East." Replace with what? Other oil? Never mind. Such recurring goals, located safely over the horizon, resemble Soviet agricultural quotas, except that no one will be shot when they are not met.

SOTU fluff-ola to feed amidst the Syriana-infused zeitgeist. Some quick facts. Let's recall oil, of course, is a globally traded commodity. As Frank Verrastro of CSIS has pointed out recently in the FT, even if we didn't import a single drop of oil from the Middle East in the future, countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will still have a major role in setting the price. As Verrastro put it: "You pay the global price and it doesn't matter where you buy it from." Currently, we only import roughly 20% of oil from the Mideast (we import more from Canada than we do from Saudi Arabia, for instance), but some 2/3rds of the world's proven reserves are located in the Middle East. So Middle Eastern oil producers will become more, not less, important going forward. And while it is laudable of Bush to talk of increasing research on hybrid cars, or alternate ways to produce ethanol etcetera, let's all be clear on one thing: boosting ethanol production via "wood chips, stalks or switch grass" isn't going "to replace more than 75% of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025", Bush's stated goal in the SOTU.

Regardless of this rather transparent attempt at putting forth a catchy soundbite re: reducing our oil dependency on all those bad guys in the chaotic 'region', I suspect key OPEC countries read this portion of the SOTU as mostly rhetoric for domestic consumption, and that it won't have a material impact on their budgeting on going forward production capacity. Such, er, clarifications will help ensure this. As will the fact that there was nary a mention of conservation efforts, or slowing the growth in consumption (dare I even utter the dreaded "T" word, in this context?), and other related serious measures along these lines. The "addicted to oil" line was, mostly, populist drivel for dim anchors to clumsily cogitate over during the morning news shows the day after, and little more than that really. We will be importing oil, in massive quantities, for many decades to come--and likely more and more of it, proportionately, from the Middle East going forward. (All this said, Negroponte raises real issues here in terms of how greater oil wealth is allowing for increased trouble-making by countries like Nigeria and Venezuela. But switch grass isn't the magic bullet that's gonna make the difference, sad to say...)

P.S. Don't miss this amusing snippet from the article linked above:

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." The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble.

As I said, mostly drivel. SOTUs are getting increasingly tedious, no?

Posted by Gregory at February 5, 2006 01:44 AM | TrackBack (0)