MR. BODMAN: I would call it that, yes. I think that there is great concern. You, you started out, you started out with the suggestion that it’s the number one issue on the minds of the American public. It’s something this president takes very seriously. It’s something the entire administration takes very seriously. And, you know, we’re doing everything we know how to do to deal with it that works. Not the things that we know for a fact do not work.

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Durbin, the Democrats, Al Gore urged Bill Clinton to tap that reserve. Democrats have, and the secretary’s right, urged the president to tap into it. Now that he is withholding some oil and trying to hold prices down, Democrats are criticizing him for doing just that.

SEN. DURBIN: The reserve’s almost full. The amount that’s going to be withheld is going to have no measurable impact on price in the market. I think those of us who’ve looked at the reserve in the past have also looked at the, the impact of these oil prices. I’m from the state of Illinois. We’re proud to have Chicago’s hometown airline, United. They just went through bankruptcy. And if you ask the CEO, Mr. Tilton, what was the major driving factor, he said it was the price of fuel. Price of fuel drove them to lay off thousands of people, to force others to take massive wage cuts, to cut back on the retirement benefits of thousands of people as well. It’s impacting agriculture, it’s impacting taxi cab drivers. You name it. Average families feel it. And now what we’re saying is, “Mr. President, last August you signed your Energy Bill. Your Energy Bill didn’t serve America well.” We need a new direction.”

We can’t do more of the same. We have to step out and look at this problem anew. And to hear, as some said earlier, we are a carbon-based economy, it’s true. But let’s be honest, there’s an environmental impact here as well. As I mentioned to you earlier, Al Gore was—made a presentation yesterday about the impact of global warming as we burn all this fuel. We should be moving toward more conservation, more fuel economy, more efficiency, ways to fuel our economy that won’t destroy this Earth in future generations.

MR. RUSSERT: We’re going to take a quick break and come back and talk about consumers. We have to look in the mirror and find out what are we doing, and where do we go in the future to become energy independent in the United States of America. We’ll be right back.

Story continues below ↓

(Announcements)

MR. RUSSERT: More of our special edition of MEET THE PRESS, gasoline prices, after this station break.

(Announcements)

MR. RUSSERT: And we’re back. Daniel Yergin, let me quote again from you. “Every president who has problems with energy learns that there is not a lot you can do in the short term. The system is overstressed ... and the truth is most of the solutions are medium-term or long-term. What counts in the short-term is demand, he said, noting that prices retreated when consumption dropped amid the price surge that followed last year’s hurricanes. For immediate effects, Yergin said, it’s really not what the administration does - what really matters is what consumers do.”

DR. YERGIN: Well, first thing, of course, it’s very painful for an awful lot of people, but they respond, they change how they drive, who they drive with, they switch to mass transit, and lo and behold, you start to see the demand coming down, and that takes some of the pressure off price. And we’re in a situation as we look to the summer is if we don’t have anymore disruptions, if we don’t have problems with Iran get out of hand, we could actually see gasoline prices lower. But there’s a lot of risk in the market, so you asked a very good question about “What happens if the prices go higher?”

MR. RUSSERT: Tom Friedman suggests and hopes that oil will go to $100 a barrel, because he thinks only then...

DR. YERGIN: He’s not running for office is he?

MR. RUSSERT: But he thinks only then will American consumers and political leadership and, and industry leadership get the message and say, “You know what? We have to do something different. We have to get off oil and change our behavior and change our habits.”

DR. YERGIN: Well, it seems to me that we’re already seeing that change. I think there’s an embrace of conservation efficiency across the board in a way that there hasn’t been for a number of years. And certainly the movement towards renewables, alternative, diversifying the gasoline pool, I think we are at a turning point as it is now.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me go back to the State of the Union Address, this is President Bush, January 31, 2006. Let’s watch.

(Videotape, January 31, 2006):

PRES. BUSH: Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy, and here we have a serious problem, America is addicted to oil.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Cavaney, you agree with that?

MR. CAVANEY: We’re addicted to oil, if you want to use that term, because hydrocarbons, which is oil, coal, natural gas, have a lot of energy content, the most energy content per volume, about 30 percent more than, let’s say, alcohol, which is what ethanol is. But the industry is working very hard, we worked together with the agricultural interests to come to—with a historic pact in the year 2001 to go to Congress to put together a program that would gradually incorporate alternative fuels, like biodiesel and ethanol, and we’re well along the path to the 2005, 2006, 2007, each year it’s going to be a bit more, and by 2012 we’ll have at least 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol alone included in our national gasoline pool.

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Cramer, if these gasoline prices keep going up, what’s it going to do to our economy? The airline costs, the pizza deliverer, the cab driver, everybody—the consumer is going to be affected in a very negative way.

MR. CRAMER: Should be. But the consumer’s shockingly resilient. Yesterday, Wal-Mart, 100 million shoppers in America go there every single week, 6.8 percent increase in comparable store sales over last year. Remarkable. The highest that Wal-Mart has had in many years. It shows me that the consumer, and that’s the month of April, consumer is not being impacted as much as you would think.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me show you something from The New York Times about Brazil. And this is quite striking and I think a lot of the country will be surprised by this, and I’ll put it on the screen. “With Big Boosts From Sugar Cane, Brazil Is Satisfying Its Fuel Needs. [Brazil] expects to become energy self-sufficient this year, meeting its growing demand for fuel by increasing production from petroleum and ethanol. Already the use of ethanol, derived in Brazil from sugar cane, is so widespread that some gas stations have two sets of pumps, marked A for alcohol, G for gas. ... Today, less than three years after the technology was introduced, more than 70 percent of the automobiles sold in Brazil ... have flex fuel engines [that run on both ethanol and gasoline] which have entered the marketplace generally without price increases.” Here’s Brazil, South America, automobiles, flex fuel at the same costs people can buy gasoline-fueled automobiles, and they’re using sugar cane grown in Brazil...

MR. BODMAN: Right.

MR. RUSSERT: ...to fuel the cars. How can Brazil do it and not us?

CONTINUED

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