Bush also gave U.S. oil companies more time to pay back emergency loans from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to put more oil on the market.
"Our strategic reserve is sufficiently large enough to guard against any major supply disruption over the next few months," he said. "So by deferring deposits until the fall we'll leave a little more oil on the market."
The amount of remaining oil that was scheduled to be delivered to the reserve was 2.1 million barrels in May, which would supply about two hours of the average 21 million barrels of oil the United States consumes each day. "Every little bit helps," Bush said.
Bush called on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to use fully its authority to waive federal clean-burning gasoline rules this summer, and called for a state task force to look in to ways to cut the dozens of so-called boutique fuel blends, which make it harder for refiners to move gasoline supplies to regions hit by shortages.
"When you have an uncoordinated, overly complex set of fuel rules, it tends to cause the price to go up," Bush said.
Where to start? Let's begin by looking at freezing the repayment to the Strategic Petroleum Reserves. What's that I hear, it's a tsunami of excess oil cascading down the street to my house. Hardly, the amount of oil scheduled to be repaid amounts to 00.33% of the oil we will use in May. That won't affect anything, other than saving oil companies money as they won't have to pay back higher priced oil than they borrowed, even though that amount of money is a pittance in oil company terms.
Bush also said that we are going to stop adding to the SPR, a move that he apparently didn't know we made a few months ago. Idiot.
The real concern here is the waving of summer gas regulations. We have these regulations for a reason, smog. And yes, we do have a complex set of fuel rules for that very reason. Look, it's because it's a complex problem, one that Bush doesn't seem to understand. Summer in Miami isn't the same as summer in Maine, or Seattle, or Los Angeles. We have different fuel blends for different weather patterns all over the United States. You can't eliminate these so called boutique fuel blends without creating a lot more smog. I'm sure asthma sufferers all around the country were happy to hear that they might not be able to breathe this summer.
Bush's speech was just symptomatic of the problem that this administration has with governing the country. I'll write about that a little later.
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