ABSTRACT
The two former oilmen elected or nearly elected to boss the United States in 2000 and 2004 pledged to make the country "energy independent". The United States became not less but more dependent on external suppliers. Americans imported 30 percent of their energy in 2007. The man from whom Bush took the presidency in 2000, Al Gore, won a Nobel Peace Prize for alerting millions to the dangers of global warming. But the message of Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, did little to shake Bush's policies on energy and the environment. With less than 5 percent of the world population, the United States consumes a fourth of the world's resources and produces one-quarter of the emissions that damage health and the environment. It uses twice the energy employed in Japan or Europe to produce one unit of GDP. The Bush team supported research in oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy but gave comparatively little to alternative energy sources.
