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 Barreling Along Without a Clue
 
 By Eugene Robinson
 
  Spring is truly the season of love, the time when a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of petroleum and its many useful derivatives.
 
 President Bush set the mood, strolling hand in hand with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah like a moonstruck teenager pining after the oil-rich despot of his dreams. The backdrop of glorious Texas bluebonnets in bloom was romantic enough, but Abdullah was clearly determined to play it coy. You can imagine his demurral: Someday we'll pump a little more oil, George, but this is only our second date here at the ranch. You're moving too fast. What kind of crown prince do you take me for?
 
 Meanwhile, the rest of us are revving up for the intense, warm-weather phase of our relationship with our vehicles. Are the citizens of any other nation so emotionally involved with their cars and trucks that they write love songs to them? From the Beach Boys' "Little Deuce Coupe" through Prince's "Little Red Corvette" to R. Kelly's bizarre lyric line "You remind me of my Jeep," Americans have long displayed a car fetish that borders on the pathological.
 
 Even gasoline prices that have flirted with $3 a gallon in some parts of the country aren't enough to cool this automotive ardor. They do make people mad, though, and as Jimmy Carter once learned, it's the president who ends up sleeping on the couch.
 
 "If I could, I would" lower gas prices, Bush, the former wildcat oilman, said in a speech Wednesday on energy policy. He was quick to add that "ou  r children and grandchildren" would benefit from the strategy he was laying out, making no promises of relief anytime soon.
 
 In selling his pastiche of measures to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil, Bush went so far as to praise the dastardly French, of all people, for getting three-quarters of their electricity from nuclear power, which he called "one of the safest, cleanest sources of power in the world." He didn't mention that more than half of our electricity comes from coal, which is not so clean, or that his administration has gutted regulations that would have made it cleaner.
 
 It shouldn't surprise anyone that this hydrocarbon-based administration continues its silence on global warming, as if closing your eyes and covering your ears will make the problem go away. Nor is it news that conservation is always at the bottom of any list of remedies, or that there's never much money for alternative energy sources such as solar or wind. It's ridiculous that Bush's energy bill gives oil companies such big incentives for exploration, as if the $50-plus price of a barrel of oil weren't enough. And even though an oil strike in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge might nudge that price down a touch, the contribution to energy self-sufficiency would be so small that it wouldn't justify raping the tundra.
 
 The salient problem affecting the price at the pump, as we get ready to put the top down and hit the open road, is that there's not enough refinery capacity in the United States. Tankers arrive at East Coast ports every day full of refined gasoline because we can't do the job at home. But who wants a new refinery built next door? We love our air conditioning in the summer, but who wants a new coal-fired electric plant down the street? Or a liquefied natural gas terminal?
 
 Or, for that matter, hundreds of windmills spoiling pristine, million-dollar vistas in Nantucket or Malibu?
 
 The reason the president's energy policy looks like such a muddle is that he doesn't have a clue what the ultimate cure for our self-destructive addiction to fossil fuels will be -- and neither does anyone else. He's probably right to predict that some technological advance will get us out of this environmental and economic mess. Maybe solar power will become practical on an industrial scale. Maybe someone will figure a way to use nuclear processes to make power without generating tons of toxic waste. Maybe hydrogen, the president's favorite new technology, will move beyond the laboratory.
 
 Sheik Zaki Yamani, the Saudi oil minister during the energy crisis of the 1970s, used to say, "The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil." Some bright post-doc in a university lab might stumble across the solution tonight.
 
 We should hope so. China and India, industrializing like crazy, are beginning to suck up oil so greedily you'd think they were . . . you'd think they were Americans.
 
 When Shanghai pop stars start singing anthems to their cars, we'll know we're really in trouble.
 
 eugenerobinson at washpost.com
 
 
 
 
 
 
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