ABSTRACT
In his State of the Union speech on 31 January 2006, U.S. President George W. Bush called for a drastic change in the nation’s energy policy. “Keeping American competitive requires affordable energy,” he argued, “and here we have a problem. America is addicted to oil.” The president set a goal to “replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.” This call represents another effort in a long history by U.S. Republican and Democratic administrations to articulate a comprehensive long-term energy strategy, an effort that has largely failed for obvious reasons.
