FOR 40-odd years now, Barack Obama lamented earlier this month, American politicians have banged on endlessly about the evils of America's dependence on imported oil, without doing very much about it. It was time, he declared, to change that. Today he unveiled a package of initiatives that would cut America's oil imports by a third within a decade, according to the White House. Unfortunately, however, Mr Obama's latest initiative seems doomed to go the same way as all the brave talk from his predecessors.

Mr Obama's plan has four main strands: increasing domestic production of oil, boosting output of biofuels as a substitute, encouraging the use of natural gas as a transport fuel, and making vehicles more efficient. He also chucked into the mix his “clean energy standard”, a scheme to promote less polluting forms of electricity generation, even though it has nothing to do with oil imports.

None of this is new. The clean energy standard was first wheeled out in his state-of-the-union address, and is anyway only a rehashed version of a much older proposal to promote renewable energy, with nuclear power and natural gas bolted on to broaden its appeal. The administration was already working on a fresh series of ever more demanding fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles for when the current lot runs out, in 2017 2016. Mr Obama had also previously pledged to nurture the current growth in domestic oil production, to counter Republican cries of “Drill, baby, drill.” The government has been subsidising biofuels for decades, and the Department of Energy is already lending money to the sort of high-tech but handout-dependent plants that the president wants more of. Even talk of encouraging natural-gas vehicles is nothing new: T Boone Pickens, an irrepressible oilman, has buttonholed half of Congress, and anyone else who will listen, on the subject.

Worse, those parts of the president's plan that need congressional approval—the clean energy standard, more subsidies, extra funding for research on whizz-bang energy technology—will never receive it. The Republicans who control the House are dead-set against anything that smacks of greenery, not to mention anything that would add to spending at a time when they're trying to take an axe to it. They have already ruled out the president's signature energy policy: a cap-and-trade scheme to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. They are also trying to rein in the Environmental Protection Agency. The best the president can hope to do is hold the line, and preserve the EPA's existing authority. So it is hard to see his half-baked, reheated list of proposals as anything more than a reassurance to the environmentally-minded, and to Americans fretting about rising fuel prices, that the president feels their pain—unlike those nasty Republicans.

(Photo credit: AFP)