These must be schizophrenic days for George Bush.
Our vacationing oilman president seems at a loss as to what, if
anything, he should do about rising gasoline prices. That should
come as no surprise. When he was in the oil business decades ago in
Midland, he set the record for drilling dry holes. Bush doesn’t
seem to know his oil from a hole in the ground.
And he’s not much better at conserving it than he is at
producing it.
These must be schizophrenic days for George Bush.
Our vacationing oilman president seems at a loss as to what, if anything, he should do about rising gasoline prices. That should come as no surprise. When he was in the oil business decades ago in Midland, he set the record for drilling dry holes. Bush doesn’t seem to know his oil from a hole in the ground.
And he’s not much better at conserving it than he is at producing it.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that a proposed change in the way automakers calculate fleet consumption standards, which would have required greater fuel efficiency for SUVs, was abandoned by the administration for fear of upsetting those same automakers, who are in trouble for building gas-guzzlers they’re having trouble selling. Go figure.
The rule change, widely anticipated in the industry as inevitable, was not some wild-eyed mandate pushed by environmental groups. The White House itself proposed the change two years ago.
Still, our oilman president and vice president can at least be counted on to understand the finite nature of oil, and the inevitability of a decline in availability, can’t they? Maybe not.
During a Q&A session with reporters Aug. 1, Bush let slip the opinion that intelligent design should be taught in school alongside evolution. Equating intelligent design with evolution could explain why Bush didn’t know where to look for oil in Texas.
If he doubts that the stuff burning in our engines is the bi-product of naturally deselected dinosaurs, then he may believe it didn’t come from biomass laid down in marine sediments hundreds of millions of years ago, but was put wherever it is by God.
Such doubts could even belie a belief that God created more oil than we’ve been able to find so far using mere science, and that shortages aren’t inevitable. No need, then, to worry about those troublesome gas prices.
Of course, that would fail to explain why a man of his faith couldn’t find it himself. If you had spent much of your adult life drilling unsuccessfully in a state where oil practically leaps out of the ground, it must be tempting to ditch the evolutionary explanation for one that puts God in charge.
To be fair, although most subscribe to the dead dinosaur theory, there are competing hypotheses of the origins of oil and where it can be found. But if natural selection is, as the purveyors of intelligent design believe, a myth, then we needn’t rely on the vagaries of science to explain those origins, or by extension the problem of the imbalance in supply and demand currently driving up oil prices.
That lays the blame for $3 gas squarely at the feet of God, not the administration or the oil companies that helped put him in office – whom I hear he treated well in his recent energy bill. Convenient.
If Bush can square the circle of those contradictions – oil, with its evolutionary pedigree, and intelligent design – then the next step is to get God on the Red Phone and put the Big Guy (in this White House, God is a guy and a Republican) to work bringing down gas prices.
If He doesn’t act soon, Hubbert’s Peak is will render Bush’s rejection of higher SUV mileage standards moot.
Hubbert’s Peak was a prediction put forward in 1956 by M. King Hubbert, a Shell oil geophysicist who correctly forecast a 1970 peak in U.S. oil production. More recent calculations of his “peak” have projected that worldwide oil production will plateau this year and then begin to fall. Some have been so bold as to proclaim a peak date: Thanksgiving, November 24. After that, rising demand and falling production will, they say, make $3 gas look cheap. Consumers may begin to naturally deselect SUVs.
The shaky edifice of the realities of oil versus intelligent design – which Bush careful avoided endorsing overtly – demonstrates how much easier faith (or at least the faithful) is to manipulate than stubborn science – or, for that matter, markets. But the real problem with intelligent design is that it makes God look dumb – a trait which, some say, comes to George Bush naturally.
John Yewell is the city editor for the Hollister Free Lance. Reach him at [email protected]
