Quando o dinheiro aperta...

The Oily Slope

George W. Bush has traveled many long roads since he entered the Oval Office in January 2001. But few are quite so long as his personal journey on the energy issue--arguably the single subject he and his veep know more about than anyone else in their administration.

In 2000 Bush campaigned against Al Gore’s green-tinged policies by lampooning them, suggesting that hybrid vehicles were some kind of alien life form. Now the president tours hybrid-vehicle facilities like they are a second home, laying out his vision for a nation of electric- and hydrogen-powered cars. This isn’t, as some critics have suggested, a superficial move: Bush is sold on the new technologies of the auto industry.

But that’s not Bush’s only reversal on energy. This week’s four-point plan on gas prices marked the end of another of the president’s signature positions. In 2000, he campaigned as a Reagan-style free-marketer who opposed what he saw as the regulatory excesses of the Clinton years. Reagan wanted to get government off the back of business. This week Bush urged his own Justice Department to get on the back of the oil industry, launching an investigation into possible market collusion or price-fixing of gasoline.

Such investigations are notoriously difficult, and the bar is high when it comes to litigation. In the early 1980s, the Justice Department sued American Airlines’ Robert Crandall for his attempt to raise prices together with his counterpart at Braniff Airlines. Crandall was secretly tape-recorded as he phoned Braniff, saying that if the company raised its prices by 20 per cent, “I’ll raise mine in the morning.” It would be hard to come up with a clearer attempt to manipulate prices, but the lawsuit ended with a slap on the wrist: Crandall merely agreed to stop having such conversations about fares.

In the case of the oil industry, there’s no suggestion of behavior like that. When asked if there were any suspicions of market manipulation, the outgoing White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan came up with nothing. “It’s important to make sure that there’s not any price gouging,” he simply stated.

In fact, President Bush has repeatedly explained why gas prices are high for a host of reasons other than price gouging. “We live in a global marketplace, and when the demand for crude oil goes up in China or India, fast-growing economies, if the corresponding supply doesn't meet that demand, the price of gasoline is going to go up here in America,” he told an audience in West Sacramento, Calif., on Earth Day last weekend. “The American people have got to understand what happens elsewhere in the world affects the price of gasoline you pay here.”

President Bush is of course feeling the intense political pressure of high gas prices, which his aides have blamed for a steady decline in his approval numbers for the last 15 months. That pressure led to another energy reversal this week, as Bush fiddled with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Bush dismissed as a political stunt Bill Clinton’s release of oil from the reserve in 2000, and he repeated the same charge against John Kerry in 2004. This week, he followed Clinton and Kerry with an even less significant move--suspending shipments to the reserve.

In Newsweek

Aqui está mais umas das provas que o dossier «energia» está em cima da mesa em todo o mundo. Um dos homens mais conservadores de que há memória na presidência dos Estados Unidos muda de opinião radicalmente em relação a certas prioridades energéticas em menos de 5 anos. Pode-se dizer que para a velocidade do processador dele foi um pensamento num ápice! LOL