(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:

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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?

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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:

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The Fiscal Year 2006 Budget Request for EERE is $1.2 billion, a $48.2 million decrease compared to Fiscal Year 2005 funding.

Let’s assume they got what they wanted for for FY2006

  • FY2006: $1,200,414,000 (down 3.9%)

The promised 22% increase gives us this:

  • FY2007: $1,464,500,000 (up 22%)

$264 million of new money for EERE. It’s not chump change.

Then again, for the cost of the Iraq war we could have had about 900 times more (and counting). So there’s that.