Obama's energy love fest

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This rhetorical scorecard from last night's State of the Union address says quite a bit about how environmental issues figure into our current political landscape, and could be a preview of how Obama will try to play them in this year's campaign. Environmental regulation and protection are politically thorny territories for Obama. It would be unfair to say he's abandoned the cause of the environmental protection (the EPA, after all, has been quite busy lately), but it's clear that cheerleading it before a primetime audience isn't something he sees as politically expedient.

Where he did give attention to green causes, he chose his words carefully. He talked about "clean energy" not "renewable energy." There's a big difference between the two: natural gas and coal can't, by any stretch of the imagination, be classified as renewable resources. "Clean" is a much squishier category, though. And according to a brief on the priorities Obama outlined that was released by the White House after the speech, it includes: "wind, solar, biomass, hydropower, nuclear power, efficient natural gas, and clean coal." It's the kind of catch-all Obama so favors -- the kind that allows him to throw almost everyone a bone.

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1.) "I'm directing my administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources," he said. As The Hill points out, this wasn't so much the unveiling of a new policy as a very public trumpeting of Interior's draft offshore leasing plan for the next five years, which would encourage new development in the Gulf of Mexico and north of Alaska.

2.) "Natural gas is America's new best friend!" OK, he didn't actually say that, but it was, more or less, his message. In his words: "We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy." He pushed the notion that fracking could be done safely, and advocated for disclosure of the chemicals used to frack wells on public land.

http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/obamas-energy-love-fest