“Instead
of wiping out decades of coastal protection with the stroke of a pen, President
Bush should instead wield that same pen to aggressively raise fuel economy
standards to save consumers money and save oil.
Opening our protected coasts to Big Oil will increase the risk of oil
spills and do nothing to reduce consumer costs or our dependence on oil. We need to produce cars that go further on a
gallon of gasoline, invest in mass transit and other alternatives to driving,
and develop clean renewable energy.
Any
effort to turn more of our energy future over to the oil companies that are
banking record profits while driving up consumer prices is a foolish retread of
past failures. There’s no need to
sacrifice our white sandy beaches for more oil industry profits when we have
the technology to build cars that go 100 miles per gallon. President Bush’s
National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) has cynically
estimated the price of a gallon of gasoline at $2.32 in 2015 to justify doing
the bare minimum required by law on fuel economy. The agency’s own rulemaking says
that a gasoline price of even just $3.21 in 2015 would justify setting a fuel
economy standard of at least 35 mpg, almost 4 mpg higher than they proposed.
With
less than 2 percent of the world’s known oil reserves and 25 percent of the
demand this is one problem we cannot drill ourselves out of. According to
President Bush’s own Energy Information Administration, drilling in currently
protected offshore areas would not significantly affect domestic oil production
until 2030 and the impact on prices would be “insignificant. What we need to do
is reduce the number of times we have to go to the pump.
President Bush should focus on real opportunities to
move us towards a clean energy economy. Making our cars, trucks and
buildings more efficient and shifting to clean renewable energy is the only way
to solve our energy crisis.”
