I was feeding my son last night as I watched the President's State of the Union address. My four year old daughter then asked me who the President was and when I tried to explain, she asked, "What does he do that is so exciting and special?" I was somewhat at a loss for words, as I tried to keep watching the speech. When the President addressed energy issues, I was glad to hear that he wants to reduce oil usage by 20%, in ten years. Yet, what followed that seemed so superficial. I started to wonder how genuine his commitment to making this happen, truly is. I think he has some real concern about reducing our dependence on foreign oil, yet his own opportunities to make this a reality in the past were somewhat passed up. When he could have really cracked down on minimum gas mileage requirements to make them far superior to what we had in say, the 1970s, he didn't do it. In addition, I've never seen any press about him checking out hybrid or hydrogen vehicles or showing any real excitement over alternative fuel vehicles. Shouldn't he be doing this to show that he is not only a product of the oil industry from which he is rooted? Further, he needs to encourage the funding of alternative energy companies on a much wider basis. After all, he can talk about ethanol from wood chips, corn, etc., yet the reality is we may simply not have enough of it to allow the 20% reduction in oil consumption. I believe that he should be trying to obtain and perfect the hydrogen technology for our nation, as quickly as possible. Why not take a trip to Iceland where most of their vehicles operate on hydrogen? This would demonstrate a real commitment to changing our ways as far as oil is concerned.

As I continued to listen to the speech, I heard his one isolated comment about climate change. I then thought I missed something as I continued to feed my son, because all of a sudden the speech shifted to Iraq. Iraq is a topic that needs more time than the entire speech duration allowed. Yet, global warming should not get short shrift by having about ten seconds allocated to it. How can the President be serious about forestalling climate change when he said absolutely nothing about plans to limit greenhouse gas emissions? Is he planning to put off discussions of how to do this for another day, since it does not seem that pertinent? If all he's planning to do is hope for industry to voluntarily reduce greenhouse gases, then the global warming threat will not cease. Rather, it will become more and more of a reality. Why is the President not seeing the urgency of this issue when companies like Duke Energy and Alcoa are actually asking the federal government to take action on this issue? It seems a bit ironic. Hopefully, our Congress will take the action that the President is hesitating to precipitate.

If the President actually took some serious and calculated measures to decrease our oil dependence and to combat global warming, I would have a great answer to my daughter's question as to what he has done that is exciting and special.