Last Tuesday, President Bush delivered his 7th State of the Union address.

Going into the speech, the speculation was that Bush was going to make a strong statement around energy policy and would potentially announce new programs to help break America’s dependence on oil.

British sources went as far as predicting that President Bush was “preparing to make a historic shift in his position on global warming” and and suggested that “the US President will now agree a cap on emissions in the US”.

This speculation wasn’t entirely unfounded. President Bush used last year’s State of the Union address to announce that “America is addicted to oil” and proposed the a set of programs to help break this addiction.

While President Bush did focus a portion of this year’s speech on energy independence, the speech certainly didn’t rise to the level of a major policy announcement.

With that said, one of the sections of this year’s speech that has recieved the most attention was President Bush’s tacit acknowledgement of global warming:

“America is on the verge of technological breakthroughs that will enable us to live our lives less dependent on oil. And these technologies will help us be better stewards of the environment, and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change (emphasis added).”

This was a minor step forward for an administration that has resisted efforts to combat climate change, refused to talk about the issue, and has denied the link between human activities and climate change.

While this was not the first time that Bush admitted that climate change is real, it was the first time that he has mentioned the issue in a State of the Union speech; even in the famous “addicted to oil” speech, he failed to mention climate change.

Bush also challenged the Americans to “reduce gasoline usage in the United States by 20 percent in the next 10 years.”.

Bush then went on to describe possible solutions in reasonably broad terms.

He said we need to “increase the supply of alternative fuels” — probably a hint at corn-based ethanol — and “reform and modernize fuel economy standards” — likely a reference to an existing Bush proposal to change the CAFE standards.

But Bush failed to go into any real specifics on exactly what these changes would look like, nor did the proposals seem very bold.

While Bush should be applauded for using the bully pulplit to talk about America’s “addiction to oil” and to challenge Americans to reduce their fuel usage, the details seem to lack a bit of substance or weight.

For example, while it would be great to reduce fuel usage by 20% in 10 years, there’s nothing really remarkable about that. For comparison, the U.S. doubled the fuel efficiency standards between 1974 and 1985. So, 20% over 10 years really doesn’t seem very bold.

In addition, it probably is just a drop in the bucket of what we really need to do.

On top of this while there might be some short term promise in ethanol, I don’t think that any serious scientist believes that ethanol alone is going to get us out of this problem (for many of the reasons mentioned by readers in other articles).

Even some of Bush’s biggest supporters criticized the content of the speech:

“To be perfectly frank, I thought it was an appalling disappointment for everyone, whether you’re on the right or the left,” said Samuel Thernstrom, a former Bush environmental aide now at the American Enterprise Institute. “We had all been led to expect . . . that we would hear a very substantial initiative from the president.” Instead, he said, Bush’s plan is “essentially trivial, it’s marginal.”

What is even remarkable about this particular criticism is that the American Enterprise Institute is a right-wing think tank that has been strongly influential in the Bush administration’s public policy.

Christine Todd Whitman, the former chief of the Environmental Protection Agency offered a milder critique saying that President Bush missed the “perfect opening” to call for a cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

For all of the hype going into the address about big ideas and new proposals, I came out thinking of Clara Peller’s famous words: “Where’s the beef?”