Carly Kruse

January 26, 2007

In his 2007 State of the Union address, President Bush unveiled his goal for the United States' gasoline consumption to be reduced by 20% in 10 years. This comes just days after 10 major companies agreed to advocate for a mandated nationwide reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 10-30% in the next 15 years, as well as discourage new "'stationary sources that cannot capture' carbon dioxide." Although the companies, including General Electric, BP, DuPont, and four major utilities, advocated for Congress to impose nationwide carbon emissions caps, President Bush's State of the Union address did not.

President Bush's plan, nicknamed "Twenty-by-Ten," intends to increase fuel efficiency standards as well as increase production of alternative fuels "from wood chips to grasses, to agricultural wastes," and, most particularly, ethanol. Twenty-by-Ten, President Bush stated, will reduce U.S. imports of oil from the Middle East by 75%, as well as our "dependence (which) leaves us more vulnerable to hostile regimes, and to terrorists."

However, President Bush only plans to increase fuel efficiency standards by 4% annually beginning in 2010. Moreover, ethanol is, in Greenpeace USA's Kurt Davies' words, "a very dirty fuel" because of the large amounts of fossil fuels needed to produce it. A recent report to Congress by Phil Sharpe, President of Resources for the Future, noted that "corn ethanol is only about a 20 percent improvement over gasoline" for this reason.

Despite advocating for reductions in gasoline consumption, President Bush also pushed for doubling the U.S.'s Strategic Petroleum Reserve and increase domestic oil production "in an environmentally sensitive ways."

For more information:

President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address (January 23, 2007) (transcript available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070123-2.html).

Felicity Barringer, A Coalition for Firm Limits on Emissions, N.Y. Times, Jan. 19, 2007, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/19/business/19carbon.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.

British Broadcasting Corporation, Q&A: Bush's Energy Reforms, B.B.C. News, Jan. 24, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6293805.stm.

Resources for the Future, RFF President Briefs Senate Agriculture Committee on Energy, Oil Dependency, available at http://www.rff.org/rff/News/Releases/2007Releases/RFF-President-Briefs-Agriculture-Committee.cfm.