RIYADH, Jan 26: President Bush is again making noises on energy issues ostensibly targeted at his domestic audience. But in the process he is putting the global energy balance at risk.
In his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday, the US president, for the second year running, dwelt on the need for reducing dependence on oil from the Middle East.
Last year, too, the rhetoric was about 'oil addiction'.
The United States is today the biggest 'gas guzzler'. It needs to mend its ways not only for its own sake, but also for the sake of humanity. And when President Bush urged the American drivers to cut the petrol use by 20 per cent in ten years, everyone welcomed it.
But this advice becomes unsettling once Mr Bush starts extracting political mileage out of a crying need. "This dependence leaves us more vulnerable to hostile regimes and to terrorists who could cause huge disruptions in oil shipments, raise the price of oil and do great harm to our economy."
Who was he referring to and which regimes were in his mind? There is no prize for guessing correctly.
The US consumes 25 per cent of the total global output. The global consumption stands around 84 million barrels per day. The US imports hover around 10 million barrels per day and these mainly come from governments that President Bush alluded to in his address.
Sixty per cent of the proven global reserves are in an 'unstable' Middle East, six per cent in Venezuela and five per cent in Russia. And interestingly, 10 per cent of global crude reserves are currently in Africa - the newest addition to the US list of regions that threaten the very survival of civilisation.
President Bush also emphasised boosting production of alternative fuels like ethanol, derived from plants such as corn, sugarcane and wood. He spoke of plans to raise fuel economy standards for cars and called for investment in other `green’ fuels like bio-diesel, methanol, butanol and hydrogen.
But President Bush’s record in putting into action such pronouncements is not inspiring. The New York Times, in its Thursday editorial, put it succinctly: "For six years, off and on, President Bush has been talking about the need for alternative fuels and conservation to make the country less beholden to unreliable sources of foreign oil. Yet all he has to show for it is a growing dependence on foreign oil, a growing climate problem and an increasingly cynical public.
Mr Bush talked the same game on Tuesday night, offering several impressively specific goals. But whether these new pledges turn out to be as empty as the old ones depends on his capacity for follow-through, and history is not encouraging." On the eve of the president’s address to Congress, Saudi Arabia's ambassador in Washington, Prince Turki al Faisal, said the world’s biggest oil user will continue to rely on Middle East crude oil for many years to come. Prince Turki had a point.
"I think we should be talking not about being independent of Middle East oil for the United States, but rather being interdependent with the Middle East for energy sources," the prince said.
Others also concur. "Barring draconian measures, the United States will have to depend on imported oil for a significant fraction of its transportation fuel needs for at least several more decades," said Linda Stuntz, an energy attorney and former Energy Department official, citing a council on Foreign Relations report.
Before Mr Bush’s address, some White House officials were quoted as saying that the president had an ambitious goal in mind: the injection of 60 billion gallons (227 billion litres) of ethanol into US supplies by 2030 - 30 per cent of current gasoline consumption.
On the other hand the US Senate’s energy committee, dominated by the Democrats, last week unveiled its own five-part energy bill, envisaging a reduction in US petroleum imports by 40 per cent by 2020.
With the United States constituting only eight per cent of the global population, but consuming 30 per cent of the total crude output, any change in consumption patterns would be welcomed to a world brutalised by wars for oil.