Andy Rowell, 30 January 2007 

After all the hype of a major American policy change on energy issues and climate change, President Bush delivered a predictable speech during his State of the Union address last week.

In the run up to his annual address to the American nation, Bush’s aides had hinted of a major announcement on energy or climate. There were a few surprises on energy, but they really did not amount to much, especially once you look at the detail.

One of Bush’s “great goals” is what is being called the “20 in 10” project, which is designed to reduce US petrol use by 20 per cent over the next 10 years. This will be achieved by a five-fold boost in the production of ethanol that can be made from corn for use in cars and trucks. However look at the detail on the White House website and it says a 20 per cent reduction of “projected use” rather than actual use. There are also real questions about how much land would be needed to grow the corn.

Bush also called for increasing fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks by 4 percent a year, which is equivalent to about one mile per gallon. However this is woefully short of what is technologically possible.

Moreover, Bush proposed absolutely nothing to control carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and factories, by far the greatest source of pollution. He also refused to set mandatory carbon dioxide emission reduction targets for all carbon emissions, something he had been urged to do by politicians and scientists alike from across the globe.

So for all Bush’s big ideas, it is essentially business as usual. Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, said, “The big numbers may sound impressive, but this is nothing more than stay-the-course on global warming.”

To make matters worse, another solution put forward by Bush was the expansion of “clean, safe nuclear power”.  However just the week before, Bush had been warned of the dangers of climate change and also of nuclear proliferation, in part caused by the expansion of civil nuclear power.

The warning came from the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists” (BAS) and their “Doomsday Clock”. In 1945, scientists from the University of Chicago who had worked on developing nuclear weapons as the Manhattan Project set up the “Bulletin of Atomic Scientists”.

Two years later they introduced “The Doomsday Clock” to convey the perils posed by nuclear weapons. Since then, in times of international crisis, the clock has inched closer to midnight, the time depicted as the figurative end of civilization. Prior to this month, it had been adjusted only 17 times, most recently in February 2002 after the events of 9/11.

This month the scientists decided to symbolically move the hands of the clock from seven to five minutes to midnight, reflecting “global failures to solve the problems posed by nuclear weapons and the climate crisis.” Announcing the move, the BAS Board of Directors stated: "We stand at the brink of a Second Nuclear Age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices”.  The scientists listed their concerns: increasing global tension over nuclear proliferation, including North Korea’s recent nuclear test, and Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The scientists called for the cessation of the production of nuclear weapons material, including highly enriched uranium and plutonium—both in military and civilian facilities. The scientists called for a “serious and candid discussion about the potential expansion of nuclear power worldwide”. But Bush ignored their warning and called for a nuclear expansion.

Now take climate. The BAS statement continued: “The dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause irremediable harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival."

One of the world-renowned scientists who spoke at the symbolic event to move the clock hands, Stephen Hawking, a professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge in the UK, said “As citizens of the world, we have a duty to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day, and to the perils we foresee if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change."

The scientists are not the only ones who are worried. Many Americans are increasingly concerned about American foreign and domestic policy, energy security and climate change. At the end of last year, the non-partisan research organization, Public Agenda, introduced an “Anxiety Indicator” to its survey called the “Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index.” The indicator sums up Americans' overall “comfort level” with their foreign policy and in so doing offers a benchmark of how well Americans think the country is doing.

The results make stark reading for Bush:  According to the survey, Americans see a world of growing dangers, few solutions and little in U.S. foreign policy that seems to be working. The results of the “Anxiety Indicator” suggests that a “significant majority” of the American public is feeling anxious and insecure about the country's place in the world. The public is also quite worried about many specific aspects of the nation's foreign policy, and may be at or near a "tipping point" on issues like Iraq and dependence on foreign oil.

One of those areas that Americans are deeply concerned about is energy security and foreign oil dependence. The American public is increasingly troubled by the nation's dependence on foreign oil and views it as a threat to national security.  “Energy dependence is an area where Americans expect government action”, wrote Public Agenda.

So how has Bush done on energy security and energy dependence for the US since his last state of the Union address? It is a year ago that he shocked many people by talking about “America’s addiction to oil,” and the need to reduce it. Although Bush stunned many people by using such language, his record since then has largely been depressingly bad and predictable.

"President Bush actually cut funding for the key energy-saving technologies,'' argues Joseph Romm, a former head of the renewable fuels and efficiency programs at the US Energy Department during the Clinton administration. The Energy Department's requests for renewable fuel and conservation programs have stayed flat over the past six years, which equates to a decline of about a third if inflation is considered.

Most of the president's $2.1 billion he promised towards his “Advanced Energy Initiative” that was announced in the State of the Union a year ago has gone into nuclear research and clean coal technology that generally has little impact on the country's dependence on oil.

What he had done though is increase the proliferation of nuclear materials by backing a huge renaissance of nuclear power plants in the US.  The Bush Administration has given billions in dollars to the nuclear industry, which now believes that 2007 is the year for a “renaissance”, with over 30 new plants seeking approval. “We see a wave,” said Steve Kerekes, a spokesman with the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s chief lobbying arm, “We definitely believe it’s going to be a whole new era of new plant construction in this country”.

Bush has supported more corn-based ethanol for use in petrol but even here his administration has been criticized for not living up to his rhetoric. Although last year, Bush announced a goal to make a ``new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years.'' his administration has since only called for only a modest increase - about $29 million - for research into ethanol development.

The week before Bush's speech, the House of Representatives passed legislation that would funnel $14 billion in money collected from oil companies into a renewable fuel fund. Yet the White House actually opposed the bill because it was opposed to additional taxes on the oil companies, which are historically close to the Bush administration.

Indeed a report earlier this month by the General Accountability Office in Washington warned that it was “unlikely” that US government's research and development programs would provide enough alternative energy sources needed to “reverse our growing dependence on imported oil”.

So Bush has done little to reduce US’s dependence on foreign oil since his last State of the Union address. The measures he introduced last week are unlikely to reduce America’s foreign oil dependence or tackle climate change. At the moment, the Doomsday Clock stands at five minutes to Midnight.  Because of Bush’s policies, the clock is still ticking and time is running out.