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George W. Bush on a national response to gas prices:
President Bush said Tuesday that he will not call on Americans to conserve gasoline despite the rising price of oil, saying consumers are "smart enough" to figure out for themselves that they should drive less."They're smart enough to figure out whether they're going to drive less or not. I mean, you know, it's interesting what the price of gasoline has done," Bush said at a news conference in the White House press room, "is it caused people to drive less. That's why they want smaller cars: They want to conserve. But the consumer's plenty bright. The marketplace works.""You noticed my statement yesterday, I talked about good conservation and — you know, people can figure out whether they need to drive more or less," he said. "They can balance their own checkbooks."It'll be interesting to see whether consumers are smart enough to use phantom transit alternatives that don't exist, or they'll just cut back on groceries in order to be able to drive to work. Magic of the marketplace! But I'm going to miss this sort of thing. I've grown accustomed to Bush's zen koan-like rhythm over the past couple of years. "They want to conserve. But the consumer's plenty bright. The marketplace works." Soon enough, President Fortune Cookie will retire to Crawford, or Happy Delight Lunch Restaurant, or wherever he came from, and we'll have to parse presidential statements that are expressed in the form of whole thoughts, and that'll be time consuming.Meanwhile, as Matt points out, "of course we all make decisions that are relevant to our energy consumption. But the choices we make are affected by public policy decisions in dozens of different ways. To suggest individual action as an alternative to changing policy is to ignore the fact that different policies would produce different individual choices." Right. I live in DC, and gas costs $4, so now I take the metro. If I still lived in Santa Cruz, or Orange County, I'd still be driving, and would be cutting back on other things. Because of wise transit policy in my area, I have transportation choices. Because of dumb transit policy in other areas, lots of people don't have transportation choices, and have no choice but forced cutbacks on other priorities. Some choice.Additionally, the issue with global warming is that carbon is unpriced, so market prices won't move fast enough to prevent catastrophic climate damage. Conserving may keep people from spending beyond their means, but it won't do much to slow ecological damage. Bush has made a "choice" to ignore that. The next generation won't be so lucky. They'll get another of Bush's choice-sets, where they have no alternatives but to live in extremely adverse conditions and try to make the best of it.
