WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- The annual State of the Union speech is the classic example of the "bully pulpit" reserved for the president of the United States. In 1995, President Bill Clinton showed how it could be used to recapture the initiative after a stunning defeat in Congressional elections and President George W. Bush must hope to do the same this week.
It will not be easy. Iraq is the issue most on the minds of his electorate and Bush's new policy of 21,500 troop reinforcements to curb the harrowing violence of Baghdad has already been roundly condemned in the Democratic-controlled Congress and the opinion polls suggest that the skepticism of the American public has even increased.
So the White House is signaling that Bush's speech Tuesday evening will focus on two other issues that Americans think to be critical: health insurance and global warming. The president's radio address Saturday on health reform suggested a modest attempt to cut the number of people without health insurance, by imposing taxes on those deemed to have too much. Initial jeers from the Democrats suggest that this is unlikely to give Bush the new political momentum he needs.
Global warming is another matter. It is an open question whether his policies on Iraq or his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol have done more to damage the world-wide image of President Bush. But there is a historical irony in the way that former Vice-President Al Gore, who beat him in the popular vote in the 2000 election but lost in the decisive Electoral College, has now come back to haunt Bush with his remarkable film documentary on the threat and impact of greenhouse gases and climate change, "An Inconvenient Truth."
Bush has been his own worst enemy on this issue. There is a reasoned case to be made against the Kyoto Protocol, but Bush failed to make it. The Protocol delays for too long the essential participation of fast-growing economies like China and India, who are fast overtaking the United States as polluter-in-chief. And it fixed the game to Europe's advantage, allowing Germany to take advantage of the post-unification closure of its old East German power plants that burned filthy lignite, known as "brown coal."
It is probably now too late for Bush to win the argument over the Kyoto treaty, but there are two other arguments that he can and must make, if his speech Tuesday is not to have the same gloomy impact as his policy of a "surge" in troops for Iraq.
The first argument he should make is that the Kyoto strategy of curbing greenhouse gas emissions is not enough. Even a full and global embrace of the Kyoto targets for cutting emissions would only have a modest impact on global warming over the coming decades.
The real challenge will be to wean the global economy away from fossil fuels and from carbon, and this will depend on the development and worldwide deployment of new technologies from (convincingly safer) nuclear power to hydrogen-powered fuel cells, bio-fuels and more efficient wind and solar and tidal power systems.
This will mean a full-hearted effort to push research and development, backed by the resources (including the carrots and sticks of the tax system) of the United States. So far, Bush has given little attention, funding or support to his first-term initiative of the Climate Change Technology Program. This ought to change fast.
Bush's second argument must show that he understands the degree to which he has already been overtaken by the private sector, which should now become government's (and the environment's) best ally. Corporations around the world now understand that there is money to be made, new customers and a higher stock to be won from meeting this challenge.
Wal-Mart's shift from incandescent to energy-saving life bulbs is going to transform the industry. Tesco, the British grocery giant, is pledged to become carbon-neutral. In the 18 months since it was launched, GE's Ecomagination program to develop products "as economically advantageous as they are ecologically sound" has generated over $20 billion in sales of desalination technologies, high tech windmills, super-efficient locomotives and so on.
The U.S. Climate Action Partnership embodies this trend, bringing together some of the traditional big polluters like chemical giant DuPont, earth-mover Caterpillar, aluminum producer Alcoa and BP with environmental campaign groups like Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council. They promise to launch their own proposals this week for a public-private partnership to reduce greenhouse gases and get beyond dependence on carbon fuels.
The White House's favorite think-tank, the conservative leaning American Enterprise Institute, has startled many observers by promoting the idea of a carbon tax. A new AEI paper by Lee Lane says: "Such a tax will be hard for President Bush to swallow, but it may be the price he needs to pay to make his alternative to Kyoto credible and buy time for the next generation of clean energy technologies to develop."
And if Bush does not come up with a credible policy of his own, the Democrats in Congress are determined to do it for him, with a spate of new bills that seek to impose targets for cutting emissions and a new special committee on climate change (designed in part to get around the Energy Committee run by the veteran Congressman John Dingell from Michigan (where many of his voters are auto-workers who put their jobs first). In the Senate, Barbara Boxer is the new head of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and she says global warming is by far her top priority. She wants to get the United States out in front of the Kyoto targets by requiring a cut in emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
And if all that were not enough, Bush is being overtaken on environmental policy in his own party, with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger now demanding that his state enact a 25 percent cut in greenhouse gases by the year 2020. Schwarzenegger wants a cap-and-trade system that uses incentives and market forces to encourage companies to cut emissions, rather than simply mandating cuts like the Boxer plan. This is a debate that Bush can usefully join, debating the tactical questions of how best to do it, but above all showing in his speech Tuesday that the big strategic question is now settled: the Bush administration is going green.
