EDITORIAL – Driving less not a solution to energy crisis

Though President Bush avoided making any glaring grammatical errors in an address to the… Though President Bush avoided making any glaring grammatical errors in an address to the American people Monday, he still managed to come off sounding pretty stupid.

The subject of his speech was one of significant national importance: American energy consumption. His brilliant solution? Drive less.

Sorry, Mr. President, but you’ll have to do better than that. Solving the energy crisis by requesting the American people “pitch in” and avoid going on nonessential trips is too little and too late, not to mention entirely too impractical.

What does the president categorize as nonessential? Should people not go to the grocery store more than once a week? Not visit relatives who live out of town? Perhaps children should be limited in their after-school activities so that parents do not need to shuttle them from piano lessons to soccer practice to religious school.

Our country, sadly, has been designed around the car. We don’t have corner markets within walking distance of most residences. We don’t have a comprehensive network of bike paths in most cities and towns. What we do have is a large system of roads and an overabundance of strip malls.

This layout, plus the lack of public transportation in suburban and rural areas, requires most citizens to own vehicles for daily activities. Driving less, for the majority of Americans, is simply not an option. As the price of gasoline has skyrocketed, simple economics have already forced most people to reevaluate each trip.

The horse and buggy fell by the wayside about 100 years ago. We’ve had nearly a century to improve upon Ford’s Model T, and yet for some reason, people are able to purchase Hummer H2s – which actually get significantly fewer miles to the gallon. This is where the problem lies: not with where people are driving, but with what they drive to get there.

Fuel efficiency means making each gallon of gas travel as far as possible. If the administration truly wanted an effective energy policy, it would revamp current regulations to make cars that get good mileage – hybrid or not – the primary option for drivers. It would funnel money not into drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but into developing energy sources that are clean and renewable. Solar or wind power, hydrogen cells, bio-thermal energy – the list of possibilities is long, but without funding none of them will become refined enough to replace oil.

The simple fact that Bush has the audacity to propose driving less as a solution for maintaining oil reserves is flat-out offensive. Energy is a problem that cannot be ignored. It needs to be addressed head-on and with an eye toward the future, not danced around by a president who lines his pockets with oil-company profits.