Bush reportedly regrets global warming, energy policy decisions

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 fortune and I “smiled all the way to the bank.”

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.

[UPDATE: Bill Loveless confirms the report is real. See also official White House transcript below.]

President Bush: “And so 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. And what does that mean? Well, it means that we’ve got to figure out how to use ethanol more in our cars. Ethanol is produced mainly by cane and corn. But we’re near some breakthroughs that we can use sawgrass and biomass to be able to produce ethanol

That means we got to continue investing in hybrid batteries. Ours is a country where many people live in urban centers, like Washington, D.C., and it’s possible to have a hybrid battery breakthrough which says that the first 40 miles of an automobile can be used by electricity alone. Right now the hybrid vehicles, as you know, switch between gasoline and electrical power. But that consumes gasoline, which means we’re still reliant upon oil. The idea is to get off of oil.”

Energy Bulletin