Hot Air

Like clockwork, the impending State of the Union address means it's time once again for the Bush administration to pretend it cares about the environment. Here's the latest-

President Bush will outline a policy on global warming next week in his State of the Union speech but has not dropped his opposition to mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions, the White House said on Tuesday...

..."We'll have a State of the Union address in a week and we'll lay out our policy on global warming," Snow said when asked whether British Prime Minister Tony Blair had persuaded Bush to agree to tougher action to combat global warming...

Pardon me for my incredible skepticism, but I have something known as a memory.

Last year, at this time, the administration leaked that one big aspect of the State of the Union address was going to be alternative energy sources. Not a surprise, because in the wake of Katrina's near-destruction of the Gulf Coast (remember that?), environmental concerns were high on Americans' minds. Reread my post from then... what the administration was proposing was big stuff: hydrogen fuel stations, corn-based ethanol production, solar-powered homes, etc. Sure enough, in the speech, the President discussed these issues, telling us that-- wait for it-- we are addicted to oil. Oh my gosh!

But a few days later, we got this news: "One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally." Bold added by me because... well, wow.

It wasn't just the 2006 speech either. As Think Progress documented last year, lofty environmental promises are an annual feature of George W. Bush's State of the Union addresses. And his failure to follow up on those promises-- and his expectation that we will forget all of this-- are also an annual tradition.

So when the President speaks about global warming next week, and when the press reports this as if it's all new, remember to ignore it. The congress is planning a number of anti-climate change bills soon, but I don't expect the President to sign any bills that really dig deep into the issue. I don't think anybody really believes that anything substantive will be done about this until sometime in 2009 at the earliest.