Energy policy at risk of going up in smoke

In his State of the Union address Tuesday, President Bush is supposed to make headlines with an announcement about energy use and global warming. I have no doubt that there will be headlines; it’s the follow-through toward energy security that I worry about.

We’ve been talking about energy independence since the Arab oil squeeze of the 1970s, but the reality is that this country in 2004, according to the Department of Energy, consumed 20.7 million barrels of crude oil and refined products per day, approximately 58 percent of which were imported from other countries. Imports, it says, could account for 62.5 percent of our oil use by 2030.

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