President Bush announced that the government will investigate the possibility of price-gouging by oil companies and offer a plan to cut fuel costs. Most interestingly, in the same speech, Bush said:

Our addiction to oil is a matter of national security concern…[The U.S. should] follow suit on what we have been emphasizing, particularly through the energy bill, and that is to encourage conservation, to expand domestic production, and to develop alternative sources of energy like ethanol.

Wouldn’t allow gasoline and oil prices to creep steadily upward be the most effective way to curb our country’s addiction to oil? Instead, Bush proposes a measure (cutting oil prices) that will do little more than feed that addiction by supplying cheap product. And regarding alternative fuel sources, I must admit I’m in the Kunstler camp–the nation’s addiction to oil is only a sympton of our addiction to the car. And, alternative fuels are not the silver bullet that many people believe them to be. As Kunstler points out, the crops used for biofuel would likely be treated with petroleum-based fertilizers, and those crops still must be processed into fuel. The resource might be renewable (as compared to petroleum), but there is still an energy-intensive process to create that resource. Simply put, the problem in not a source of fuel, but the use of fuel.

Posted on 25 April 2006