President Barack Obama delivers his State of the Union address on Capitol Hill in Washington. Photo by Susan Walsh: AP

Never underestimate a politician’s willingness to pander.

That’s the obvious lesson to be had from Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Wednesday night. The speech was so predictable that it wasn’t even the most important news story of the day. That spot was claimed by Steve Jobs and Apple’s new iPad.

There are many reasons why Obama – the man who just a year ago was seen as the one who would deliver American politics from the mundane – has fallen so far, so fast, in the eyes of the public. (Full disclosure: I voted for Obama.) But surely one of Obama’s biggest problems is that he’s allergic to speaking the plain truth. His entire candidacy and presidency has been built on carefully crafted phrases and buzzwords that, in the end, have no meaning at all.

Obama built his candidacy on the line “Change you can believe in.” But his speech on Wednesday night only delivered more of the same: vague phrases and buzzwords designed to play to the masses. The president proposed a three-year spending freeze. But quickly came the caveat: “Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected.” By exempting security-related spending, now at its highest level since World War II, Obama made it clear that he has no interest in actually trying to reform the Department of Defense, an agency that has long been a poster child for waste, cost overruns, and corrupt Congressional earmarks.

But it was Obama’s verbiage on energy that really has me riled. Specifically, it was his use of the phrase “clean energy.” Obama used the phrase ten times in his speech. What does “clean energy” mean? Apparently, like the phrase “energy independence” it can mean almost anything – while also meaning nothing at all. Thus, Obama played it perfectly safe by saying he wants to “create more of these clean energy jobs.”

The president talked about the need to “encourage American innovation” and he said, “no area is more ripe for such innovation than energy.” Predictably, he talked about batteries and solar panels. But rather than advocate more domestic production of oil and gas – the two sources of energy that provide 64% of total primary energy in the US – Obama declared the need for “continued investment in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies.”

Again, he showed his preferences for buzz-phrases instead of anything approaching reality. What are advanced biofuels? There is no such thing. Despite decades of hype about cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels, the only biofuels that have achieved anything close to commercial levels of production in the US are corn ethanol and biodiesel made from soybeans. And both of those fuels are totally dependent on heavy subsidies from federal taxpayers.

Clean coal? Again, Obama resorted to a meaningless phrase. America’s coal-fired power plants have cut their overall emissions in recent years, thanks to ever-more-stringent federal air quality laws. But the phrase “clean coal” is an oxymoron. Regardless of the technology used to reduce air emissions or heavy metals, the combustion of coal still produces gargantuan quantities of solid waste. In 2007 alone, coal-fired power plants in the US generated 131 million tons of coal ash. And much of that material is contaminated with heavy metals. Furthermore, despite investing billions of dollars in “clean coal” technologies, the Department of Energy has made no significant commercial breakthroughs.

Obama has a verbal tic when it comes to “clean energy” but he provided only a lukewarm endorsement for nuclear power and no endorsement at all – none – for natural gas. This lack of vision is remarkable given that natural gas and nuclear are the fuels of the future. (That fact is a theme of my new book, Power Hungry.) Rather than call for a wholesale embrace of nuclear power, Obama gave a left-handed endorsement, saying that his push for “clean energy jobs” also “means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.” Huh? Over the past three decades, the existing fleet of nuclear plants have repeatedly proven themselves to be safe and clean. Why do we need a new generation?

But it’s Obama’s omission of natural gas in his speech that continues to stick in my craw. As I’ve written several times before on this site, the US has entered a new paradigm when it comes to natural gas. After decades of thinking that the US was running out of gas and that it would need to import increasing amounts of liquefied natural gas from overseas, the US now has a surfeit of gas. Over the past two years, several reports have put potential US gas resources on par with the gas reserves of Iran, Russia, and Qatar. And in 2009, US gas production surpassed that of Russia.

The benefits of using more natural gas are obvious. When burned it emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal. Unlike coal, it produces zero solid waste, zero heavy metals, and zero air pollutants. In short, natural gas is the cleanest of the hydrocarbons. It is, in fact, the very “clean energy” that Obama claims to be talking about. In 2008, the US consumed 136 times more energy from natural gas than it did from wind and solar. And yet, Obama made it clear that he prefers cheap political slogans to reality when he declared that “we will not continue tax cuts for oil companies.”

That one is a real howler. In 2008, the Energy Information Administration released a report which showed that in 2007, the ethanol and biofuels industry got federal subsidies worth $5.72 per million Btu of energy produced. That’s 190 times as much as subsidy as was provided to the entire US oil and gas business, which received just $0.03 per million Btu of energy produced. And the biofuel scammers got those fat subsidies even though the oil and gas business provides about 98 times as much energy as the biofuels sector. What about the wind and solar sectors? That same report found that in 2007, the wind power sector got 93 times as much in federal subsidies as were given to the natural gas sector even though the gas sector is producing 28 times more electricity than wind.¹ Solar is even worse. It received 97 times as much in subsidies per megawatt-hour produced as gas even though the gas-fired electric sector produced 900 times as much electricity as solar.

In today’s New York Times, columnist David Brooks had it exactly right, the US needs a new type of politician, “a saner, updated version of Ross Perot,” one that will “cross the country screaming the facts.” Alas, Obama has, once again, shown that when it comes to energy issues, he’s not interested in the facts.

1. In 2007, federal wind subsidies totaled $23.37 per megawatt-hour, while gas-fired electricity got $0.25. Gas was used to generate 900 billion kilowatt-hours of power, wind generated 31 billion kilowatt-hours.