Russ McBee

Following a speech in Missouri yesterday, President Bush engaged in an exceedingly rare question-and-answer session with employees of the company where he was speaking. Among other topics, he repeated his threadbare spin of ethanol as a viable fuel source:

"As you know, I'm a ethanol person," he said, explaining his belief that it can help reduce U.S. dependence on oil. "It makes sense for America to be growing energy."

Actually, it doesn't make any sense at all. Regardless of whether corn-based ethanol is more or less efficient than petroleum, the bare fact is we're burning food for fuel, and there is only so much arable land available; obviously then, the already acute food pressures on the world economy can only become more pronounced with the subtraction of a major food source from the supply chain. Every ton of burned food is a ton that didn't fill starving bellies. The current crisis in escalating food prices around the world is exacerbated by the fact that we're burning food; in the same Q&A session linked above, even Bush himself admitted that this is the case:

Bush acknowledged that ethanol has contributed to higher food prices, but said it was not the main reason. He also listed increased energy costs, which affect transportation and fertilizer prices; drought and other weather-related problems; and increased demand stemming from greater prosperity in once-poor nations. He noted that the middle class in India has grown to 350 million -- more than the population of the United States.

All of those factors he mentioned are certainly contributing to the problem, but burning corn is definitely a factor. Corn-based ethanol is simply a stupid idea.

In the same session, Bush also repeated an oft-told lie about domestic oil production and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge:

The president, who appeared to be surprised two months ago when told gasoline appeared headed for $4 a gallon, said, "I know you're having to pay more at the fuel pump than you want."

Blaming Congress for blocking efforts to allow Arctic National Wildlife Refuge drilling, for example, he said the nation needed to move away from "an energy policy that basically prohibits America from finding oil in our own land."

"If Congress is truly interested in helping relieve the price of gasoline," it would recognize that the country needed to drill for oil and gas in areas that have been off-limits largely for environmental reasons, and would encourage the construction of oil refineries.

This is sheer nonsense.

The United States consumes approximately 20 million barrels of petroleum per day. The most wildly optimistic estimate of the technically recoverable reserves in ANWR might amount to 16 billion barrels (technically recoverable reserves are those that are theoretically recoverable without any consideration of economic viability), but more realistic estimates put the number somewhere around 7 billion.

That represents a supply of somewhere between 350 and 800 days.

Of course, if the oil fields in ANWR were actually developed, it's physically impossible to expect those fields to produce more than a few hundred thousand barrels per day, at most. Production from ANWR would be a (pardon the pun) drop in the bucket compared to our daily consumption.

Furthermore, the oil produced from those fields would be sold on the open market, along with all the other oil in the world. If ANWR could even produce 1 million barrels per day (which seems highly unlikely), it would represent only 1.2 percent of the current global consumption rate of 85 million barrels per day. If it's sold on the open market, most of that oil would go to countries other than the United States. The price of oil would not be affected to any significant degree.

Meanwhile, the environment within ANWR would be permanently destroyed.

Bush and his supporters are willing to inflict permanent damage on the environment in exchange for short term economic gain for their buddies in the petroleum industry, while providing absolutely no benefit to our real national energy needs. They're more than happy to sell oil to China (which is where a lot of that ANWR oil would go) while claiming to the public that they're doing something about our nation's energy security.

The failure lies not with Congress being unwilling to destroy ANWR for Exxon's benefit. The failure lies squarely in the White House's refusal to invest in non-petroleum energy sources that don't involve the burning of food.