When President Bush talked about environmentally responsible energy in his State of the Union speech, it was a surprise to a lot of folks. He was supposed to be a patsy or a puppet for Big Oil, according to his enemies, who grumbled that he was playing against type. But, as one political consultant said to me, "If Bush was actually a pawn of the oil industry, he would never have said that. He would not want people to even begin to think about alternate forms of energy." The harsh and sometimes daunting truth is that, like everything else in...