Platts Inside Energy Extra daily newsleter for March 30,2006 reports the president as regretting his early policy decisions on global warming and energy. The question is, who is this man and what have you done with the real G.W. Bush?
I was so stunned that I couldn't believe my eyes. This can't be real, I thought. It has to be a hoax. Tomorrow, is after all, April 1st -- what we in the U.S. call "April Fools" day when pranks and hoaxes are commonly pulled. I've done it a couple times on EV World; once saying GM had decided to build an electric version of its Geo Tracker SUV and last year when I wrote that a fictitious company called Berkshire Halfway had bought us out for an undisclosed amount of money.
But this report, purportedly from Platts (www.platts.com) saying that George Bush "wishes he had taken a different tack on climate change and energy policy when he came to office..." is simply too hard to believe. I have emailed Bill Loveless at Platts to confirm the authenticity of the document dated March 30, 2006.
In the article, Platts quotes the president as saying on Wednesday, "'I guess I should have started differently when I first became president and said we will invest in new technologies that will enable us to use fossil fuels in a much wiser way.' The new technologies he referred to were ethanol and `hybrid batteries,' as well as existing ones for coal and nuclear power."
After delivering a speech at Freedom House, the president was asked about worldwide criticism of his administration's stance on global warming and Kyoto. He responded, "I believe the best way to put technologies in place that will not only achieve national objectives, like less addiction to oil, but also help clean the air, is to be wealthy enough to invest in technologies, and then to share those technologies with parts of the world that were excluded from the Kyoto protocol."
Platts noted that soon after taking office, Bush cancelled the Partnership for a New Generation Vehicle that was working on hybrid car technology in favor of hydrogen research. Since his 2006 State of the Union, he has been touting flexible-fuel, plug-in hybrids on almost every occasion.
After hearing the president's remarks about plug-in hybrids, one EV World reader asked the reformed George Bush tongue-in-check , "Who are you and what have you done with the president"?
In the same March 30, 2006 issue of Platts Inside Energy Extra, is a report that the real cost of America's annual oil addiction goes way beyond the price of a barrel of oil. In Senate testimony Wednesday, Milton Copulous of the National Defense Council Foundation placed the real cost at $825 billion.