US:Any presumption that the White House has gone green does not stand up, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
There was nothing startlingly new on the environment in President Bush's state of the union speech. He said much the same in his address to the US Congress last year about the need to invest in new technologies "to develop cleaner, cheaper and more reliable alternative energy sources".
Then, and again this week, the context was not environmental but rather a drive for energy security, so that the US would be less dependent on "foreign oil". And as he said last year, "we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world".
In his latest address, he even managed to mention the dreaded term "climate change" - but this was almost an afterthought when he said that new technologies "will help us be better stewards of the environment, and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change".
Since first taking office in 2001 Mr Bush has demonstrated that he is one of the least environmentally conscious of recent US presidents. Not only did he pull out of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, he surrounded himself with fellow oilmen and showed no hesitation in gutting and filleting environmental laws.
But times have changed. Just before he rose to deliver his state of the union address, a coalition of some of the largest corporations in the US was calling on the president and congress to start dealing seriously with climate change by imposing mandatory limits on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
The US climate action partnership, as this coalition calls itself, includes some of the biggest names in American business, including Alcoa, General Electric, DuPont, Duke Energy, Lehman Brothers, Pacific Gas and Electric. They want the introduction of an EU-style "cap and trade" scheme for CO2.
Reflecting a growing public awareness of climate change and the threat it represents, mayors of numerous US cities have also been calling for decisive action to curb CO2 emissions, which rose again in 2006 for the third year in a row. At 20 tonnes per person per year, they are the highest in the world.
But the White House made it clear that "binding economy-wide carbon caps" are not on Mr Bush's agenda. It's being left to US industry to come up with innovations to address climate change by developing alternative energy sources, such as substituting biofuels for 35 billion gallons of petrol by 2017.