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Mixed

Here are three reviews of the speech: From a professional TV critic, from average folk on the street, and from a conservative.

Guess which one this assessment came from?

George W Bush is arguably a better public speaker now than were Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and George H. W. Bush in their prime. ...

...

... His smirks are gone. The squinting has disappeared. The nervous rushing through a speech is a distant memory. Tics are nonexistent. The first half of his speech was completely devoid of any stumbles whatsoever. ... Indeed, Bush was devoid of Bushisims.

Bush exuded confidence through his steady eye contact and his lack of head jerking. He conveyed emotion without seeming exasperated. For once, he seemed to have spent more hours in a week rehearsing his speech than at the gym. ..

... Unless you were a die-hard Bush hater, he didn't seem smug or arrogant. Instead, his tone was conversational and relaxed.

Hazard a guess, anyone?

A disinformation-cycle case study

A fascinating bit of forensic bullshitology by Tim Lambert, about chromium-6 in drinking water.

A sampling from the 2006 Seafood Summit

by Katharine Wroth Tuesday, 31 Jan 2006 Seattle, Wash. Seattle is for fish-lovers. Photo: iStockphoto. This week, 235 hardy soles braved the rains of Seattle to attend the 2006 Seafood Summit, a gathering of sustainable-seafood advocates. On Sunday, at a reception that transformed the city’s aquarium into an otherworldly nightclub, they sampled West Coast delicacies, […]

In brief: no

Earlier, I guessed that Bush's "Advanced Energy Initiative" amounted to a promise of $264 million in new money to EERE. Mike Millikin at GreenCarCongress seems to think it's more -- specifically, $996 million. Since he's smarter than me, I suppose I'll accept his breakdown of the funding, though he doesn't say where he got it:

New solar funding is almost comically inadequate

As part of the SOTU hoopla, the Bush administration released some details of a major new initiative:

The President's Solar America Initiative.
The 2007 Budget will propose a new $148 million Solar America Initiative -- an increase of $65 million over FY06 -- to accelerate the development of semiconductor materials that convert sunlight directly to electricity. These solar photovoltaic "PV" cells can be used to deliver energy services to rural areas and can be incorporated directly into building materials, so that there can be future "zero energy" homes that produce more energy than they consume.

It strikes me as a bit of an Austin Powers "ONE MILLION DOLLARS" moment. The solar industry is unlikely to turn down the money, but let's face it: The total, not to mention the increase, is peanuts. It gets us back up to the level of R&D funding during the Carter Administration.

More to the point, what we need is not R&D, but deployment. California just passed a $3.2 billion program to put solar on 1 million rooftops in the next 11 years. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but if you take seriously the fact that global warming has the potential to destroy the foundations on which our current way of life is built, and we need to seriously reduce carbon emissions now, then this remedy is so pathetically inadequate to the problem that it seems more like an insult.

Pier Pressure

Dockworkers’ union pressures seaports to cut emissions Sittin’ on the dock of the bay, gettin’ lung cancer … wait, that’s not how the song goes? Tell it to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, representing 60,000 dockworkers on the West Coast, which this week is kicking off a campaign to pressure ports and shipowners to […]

The Pain in Maine Falls Mainly on the, Uh, Salmon

Maine salmon teeter on the edge of extinction Endangered Maine salmon don’t get as much press as their sexy Pacific Northwest cousins (what, you don’t find salmon sexy?). But they may be closer to extinction. Currently only about 80 adult salmon return from the ocean each year to spawn in the eight Maine rivers where […]

SOTU: Omissions

Two terms not used in last night's speech: "global warming" and "Hurricane Katrina."

Wonder why?

Bush’s goal is timid

Last night the president uncorked what to casual ears might have seemed an ambitious and inspirational proposal :

Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.

"75% of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025." Hmm. As usual, the closer you look at the language, the more hedged you realize it is.

There are two basic problems with the goal -- aside from the unlikeliness of Bush competently following up on it, that is.

First: Just under 24% of our oil imports are from the Persian Gulf (Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates). Canada is our biggest supplier, followed by Mexico. There are only three Middle Eastern countries in the top 10, and Saudi Arabia alone accounts for 15 of those 24%.

Oil imports constitute somewhere around 60% of our oil use, so Persian Gulf oil amounts to around 14% of our total oil use. Cutting that 14% by 75% would amount to reducing our overall oil consumption by 10.5%

That what Bush's grand energy initiative amounts to: A reduction of U.S. oil consumption by 10.5% over 19 years. That's really the best he thinks we can do?

Not much

(Warning, numbers ahead. And I'm notoriously awful with numbers.)

This president has been known to ... mislead those who do not parse his words like Talmudic scholars. Here's what he said this evening:

So tonight, I announce the Advanced Energy Initiative -- a 22-percent increase in clean-energy research at the Department of Energy ....

So what, pray tell, is the current budget for clean-energy research at the DOE?

I'm going to assume Bush was talking about the DOE's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy dept. Here are its budgets over the past few years:

• FY2003: $1,202,326,000

• FY2004: $1,235,478,000 (up 2.7%)

• FY2005: $1,248,582,000 (up 1.1%)

The FY2006 budget (PDF; view as HTML) says this: