Hightower Lowdown

Memo to Dubya, who said recently he was "deeply concerned" about California's energy crisis: Try to avoid applying the term "deep" to any of your thoughts.

As regards California, Bush is so shallow you can read a newspaper through him. He's simply exploiting California's problems as a cover to do favors for ARCO, BP Amoco, Exxon, and the other oil giants who ran a pipeline of cash into his presidential campaign.

He declared that the electrical crunch pointed up "a long-term issue . . . and that is, how do we find more energy supplies?" He answered his own question by tearing a page out of the oil lobby's wish list: Let the corporations rip into the ecologically sensitive Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Little George said he would act "boldly and swiftly" to enact his plan.

This plan, of course, is a fraud. Piping oil out of the Alaskan wilderness will have zero impact on electric supplies in California. Oil accounts for about 1% of the source energy used for electrical generation in California. And even on the most absurdly accelerated schedule, ANWR's small reserves of oil wouldn't start flowing for over a decade.