I can almost guarantee that if we had a leader who said we needed a "Manhattan" scale project to get our country off the oil in 10 years, every last man, woman, and child would have been 100% behind it.
I can almost guarantee
1 - That this wouldn't have been the case.
and
2 - That it wouldn't have mattered. A "Manhattan" scale project would have been woefully inadequate. Even a big enough project would take more than the 4 years since 9/11.
We could have rammed legislation through congress to mandate increasing CAFE requirements to reach 75 mpg within 10 years
I doubt that such a law could have been passed even if Bush was 100% behind it and fought hard for it. If it was passed we would still not be in a state of "energy independence".
mandate use of 50% or more corn or sugar based alcohol in our gas, provided tax incentives for consumers and manufacturers of hybrids and fuel cells, etc. That would have radically altered the landscape in this country.
Then our President could have goen to the U.N., NATO, and Europe and said, we don't need your help to fight our wars. We need your help on our "Manhattan" project to marginalize oil consumption across the world. They could have worked that into a grand, global scale new Kyoto accord, focused on getting the world off the oil, with the good side effect of environmental protection.
That would take an awful lot of corn and sugar production. Some of our gasoline uses up to 10% alcohol. Some contains 0%. Moving it all to 50% would require a massive increase in corn or sugar production, and would take a long time. It might not be practical at all. It would at least be very expensive.
If such proposals were put forth (by Bush or anyone else, on 9/12/2001 or at any other time). I would be strongly against them. They would just be bad, possibly even disastrous ideas.
Tim |
