Clarification

A poster pointed out that E85 is in fact widely used and adopted in the state of Minnesota, so I thought I'd point out a few things: The first is that, although it is widely used in MN (6% is a pretty good adoption rate, that's probably more than the number of diesel cars in CA), outside Minnesota and a few other corn-belt states, E85 is so rare as to be practically non-existent. Much of my posting was talking to fellow Californians who have never heard of E85 or know that cars are currently made that can run on it -- if people don't know about it, they can't change their habits.

The second is that my critique was largely about the language of Bush's address. To me it sounded like the language of someone who doesn't really want to solve a problem. In the corporate world, if someone speaks out in a meeting and says "Hey, X is a really big problem, we need to do something about it." the way to shut them up is to pick a senior staffer, tell him to "research" the problem and create a report.

In short, research is something you do when you don't know the answer to the problem. We don't need to pour money into research and hope that some scientest discovers portable cold fusion. We have a solution. But implementing that solution requires a lot of hard work, long term commitment, and a willingness to upset some large, entrenched special interests.

My problem was that Bush knows about the problem, pointed it out to the American public, and then refused to step up to the plate and fix it.