WASHINGTON - As with much of the rest of his State of the Union address, US
President George W Bush's proposals to boost government spending on clean
energy technologies received a tepid reaction from analysts on Wednesday, who
described the speech as uncharacteristically timid.
While energy and environmental activists applauded his portrayal of the energy
problem faced by the US as an "addiction to oil", they said his solution - a
22% increase in clean-energy research - falls far short of what is required.
And they were particularly disappointed the president in the hour-long speech
to Congress and the nation did not even mention global warming, which most
scientists believe is caused in major
part by emissions from the combustion of oil and other fossil fuels. The United
States, one of only two industrialized countries that have failed to ratify the
Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, currently accounts for more
than 25% of global emissions.
"When you completely ignore the biggest challenge of all - global warming -
your plans will never measure up," said Steve Cochran, a spokesman for
Environmental Defense (ED), who accused Bush of "thinking small".
"Last night's remarks were woefully insufficient," the New York Times declared
in a scathing lead editorial on Wednesday that was devoted exclusively to
Bush's failure either to address global warming seriously or promote
major policy reforms, such as stricter fuel-efficiency requirements for cars.
That assessment echoed much of the morning-after commentary on the address,
which is used by presidents to set the tone and legislative and policy agendas
of their administrations for the coming year.
While Bush, hobbled by public-approval ratings far below the levels of recent
presidents such as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton at comparable times in their
second terms, stuck to his familiar, sweeping pro-democracy rhetoric in the
first part of the speech - devoted mainly to the "war on terror" - much of the
rest of his speech was unusually modest both in tone, substance and even
delivery.
"This is the first State of the Union I can remember where the president ended
the evening diminished in stature rather than enhanced," wrote Ryan Lizza, a
veteran political analyst for The New Republic.
"Chastened. Deferential. Modest," was how the speech was described by Los
Angeles Times political reporter Robert Brownstein, who said the "cautious
agenda" outlined by Bush "seemed to aim less at transforming the political
debate than at helping [the Republicans] survive a hostile political
environment" in the run-up to the mid-term congressional elections next
November.
In this context, his energy-related proposals, which administration officials
had suggested to reporters would be bold and far-reaching, were anti-climactic,
particularly given the strong rhetoric he used to introduce them.
"We have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported
from unstable parts of the world," Bush declared, adding that, through the
development of alternative technologies, his goal was to "replace more than 75%
of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025".
"By applying the talent and technology of America, this country can
dramatically improve our environment, move beyond a petroleum-based economy and
make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past."
Noting that the government has spent nearly US$10 billion to develop
alternative energy sources over the past five years, Bush announced an
"Advanced Energy Initiative" that, if cleared by Congress, would boost spending
by the Department of Energy by about $300 million in fiscal 2007.
According to a fact sheet distributed later by the White House, the increase
would be parceled out over a number of pre-existing programs, including
development of "cellulosic ethanol", a fuel made from plant fibers that are
currently discarded as agricultural waste; clean-coal technologies; solar-power
development; wind-energy research; plug-in hybrids for motor vehicles; and
hydrogen fuel-cell development, an initiative that Bush first touted in 2003
but which has since "lost some buzz", as the Wall Street Journal described it
on Wednesday.
"While the rhetorical level was dramatic, the policy proposals that followed
were meek," noted David Sandalow, who heads the Environment and Energy Project
of the Brookings Institution, a centrist think-tank in Washington. One
congressional aide noted that $300 million in additional funding was equivalent
to what Washington currently spends on operations in Iraq over a two-day
period.
"I'm encouraged to see that he realizes that high energy demand is a problem -
especially demand for oil - and that this issue needs to be addressed," said
Janet Sawin, director of the Energy and Climate Change Program at the
Worldwatch Institute.
"But while research and development are important, much more needs to be done
for conservation and efficiency," she said, noting that this was missing from
Bush's proposals.
Bush's focus on reducing the percentage of oil imported from the Middle East,
which currently accounts for only about 17% of all US oil imports, even drew
scorn from neo-conservative allies of the president. They have argued that the
impact on global prices created by Washington's demand for oil - regardless of
its origin - is what empowers and enriches Middle Eastern exporters, such as
Saudi Arabia, that in their view contribute directly or indirectly to radical
Islamist movements that threaten the US and Israel.
"It doesn't matter if we don't buy oil from the Middle East," Gal Luft, a
co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, told the New
York Times. If the US doesn't buy oil from the region, "someone else will,
supporting the same regimes".
One commentator, the Washington Post's economics columnist, Steven Pearlstein,
took a particularly cynical view of Bush's proposals. "Does anyone really
believe that a president and vice president who became wealthy from their
association with the oil and gas industry, who never failed to tout the
industry line and who presided over the biggest transfer of wealth from
consumers to industry in the history of mankind - that these same leaders will
move us beyond a 'petroleum-based economy' to one based on 'wood chips, stalks
or switch grass'?" he wrote, referring to Bush's description of the sources of
cellulosic ethanol.
On the eve of Bush's address, the world's largest energy company, ExxonMobil,
announced that it had set a record last year for profits among US companies -
$36 billion - apparently as a result of skyrocketing oil and gas prices, as
well as generous tax breaks and other subsidies promoted by Bush and the
Republican-led Congress.
