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The unofficial ones were better than the soporific official response

Virginia governor Tim Kaine's Democratic response to the SOTU was not, as far as I can gather from reading around, very well-received. And it's not hard to see why. Even aside from his wandering eyebrow and the bizarre Colonial Grandma stylings of the background, he focused on the deadly boring themes of "good management" and "results." Zzzzzz ...

This was his devastating critique of Bush's conduct of the "war on terrorism":

Our commitment to winning the war on terrorism compels us to ask this question:  Are the President's policies the best way to win this war?

Woah, that's gonna leave a mark!

As for the energy stuff ... sigh. It seems that the Dems can hardly wait to hand this issue to the Republicans:

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?

Maybe oil from elsewhere?

In an earlier post, I calculated (based on 2004 figures -- I may update them shortly) that Bush's "great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025" would involve lowering U.S. oil consumption by 10.5% over 19 years. Not very ambitious.

But it's worth noting that even there I may be giving Bush too much credit. I'm assuming that he means to "replace" the Middle Eastern oil with alternatives -- biofuels, electric cars, hydrogen cars, whatnot.

It's at least possible, though, that he means to replace Middle Eastern oil with non-Middle Eastern oil. I'm no oil geologist, so I don't have a good sense of whether this is possible. But it's not outrageous to think we could cover that amount (10.5% of our oil use) by increasing imports from Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and Nigeria -- and by increasing domestic production (read: drilling in Alaska and off the coasts). Since Canadian tar sands are under furious production, it's likely that Canadian imports are going to rise anyway.

So, it's possible that Bush's "great goal" could be accomplished without reducing U.S. oil consumption at all. We could, to use his own addiction metaphor, get our fix elsewhere.

But even I'm not that cynical.

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, […]

Umbra on eco-friendly paint

Dear Umbra, I just bought a home that needs lots of TLC, and would like to do it in a way that is best for the environment and my health. Do you have any advice about the best choice of interior paint? Every room in the house desperately needs new paint, but I’d like to […]

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 […]