President George W. Bush has been making several attempts of late to demonstrate that he is serious about tackling the separate but related problems of global climate change and the United States' dependency on imported oil.

His administration has announced plans to encourage private companies to set limits on their own carbon emissions. It has issued a climate-change research strategy document and invited feedback on it from the scientific community. It says that the United States will rejoin the international ITER consortium to build a magnetic-confinement fusion experiment. It has backed a proposal to develop a 'hydrogen car', together with the infrastructure for this elusive vehicle. And last week it unveiled plans to build a coal-fired power station, the carbon emissions from which will be safely sequestered somewhere underground (see page 7).

What does this flurry of activity amount to? Looking at the few details that have been released, not a lot. The three big technical projects in this list could feature as imaginative components in a long-term energy strategy. But, ITER apart, they look decidedly half-baked. The power station, for example, will be built “with international and industrial partners” who have yet to be consulted, using technology that does not currently exist, to meet an objective that can play only a marginal role in alleviating climate change.

The principal objective here, it seems, is to generate a vague public impression that the president cares about energy and the environment, while discreetly assuring the president's true allies in the coal and nuclear industries that he is firmly on their side. An administration that prides itself on being honest and straightforward is, in this particular regard, proving instead to be anything but.