All right, I’ve been blogging on the fly since the SOTU speech, and in my haste I’ve gotten a couple of things slightly off. Boring corrections and updates below the fold.
First, in this post I tried to figure out how much money Bush was really promising with his "Advanced Energy Initiative." I assumed that the "22% increase" was simply an increase in the budget of the DOE’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy dept. — that would have amounted to about $264 million.
The smarter thing to do would have been to check the White House website, where they give a fairly detailed breakdown of the AEI. Turns out it adds up to about $996 million.
However, as I noted, about a third of that money goes to coal, which neither replaces oil nor qualifies as particularly "alternative." So the real number is closer to $660 million, about half of which goes into the hydrogen sinkhole.
Second, in this post I tried to calculate just what "replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025" amounts to. I wrote that oil imports amount to 60% of our total oil use, and that Persian Gulf oil amounted to 24% of that 60% — about 14.4% of our total oil consumption. Cutting that by 75% would mean reducing overall oil use by 10.5%. I was basing all that on 2004 numbers, though, and it turns out 2005 numbers (PDF) are available.
So, update: Oil imports now amount to 65% of our total oil consumption. Persian Gulf imports are now around 17% of total imports, thus now around 11% of total oil use. Cutting that by 75% would amount to reducing oil consumption by 8.25%. Over 19 years. Even less ambitious than it seemed.
