“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.”
