If only it were true, but somehow that’s the narrative for Derrick Jackson in the Boston Globe:

It’s still oil and nuclear power for Obama
US sits idly by as other nations heavily invest in renewable power
PRESIDENT OBAMA seems increasingly drained of the juice needed to power up a modern vision on energy. Completely absent from his address this week at Georgetown University was his promise as a candidate to go after windfall profits of oil companies and reinvest the money into wind, solar, and biofuels. Instead, he promised to expedite new shallow and deepwater oil drilling permits, even as top environmentalists say many questions remain after the BP spill disaster.
More than ever, he is wedded to pursuing “clean coal’’ and nuclear power. Meanwhile, radiation from the Japan nuclear disaster was measured thousands of times above safety levels in seawater and groundwater near the plant and in soil 25 miles away, at levels double those found in areas declared inhabitable around Chernobyl.
Most important, there continues to be no direct message to the American people that we are living in an unsustainable fantasy, consuming a quarter of the world’s energy. There was no hint of things that would instantly make Americans rethink consumption, such as a gas tax. For the moment, the road-blocking Republicans are winning the day with an ethos symbolized by Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a potential presidential candidate. Last week Barbour told Iowa Republicans, “We need more oil. We need more gas. We need more coal. We need more nuclear. We need more American energy.’’
Obama has yet to say that we need less.
“Obama will really have to work for it,’’ said Kelly Sims Gallagher, a professor of energy and environmental policy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School. “So far he has always put energy low on his list of priorities.’’
Gallagher knows a lot about where America’s priorities stand on a global scale. In testimony two weeks ago before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, she cited Denmark’s goal of 50 percent wind power, Germany’s growing solar collaborations with China, Britain’s taxes on fossil and nuclear energy, and Brazil’s sugarcane ethanol.
Gallagher said such countries are ahead of us in having a comprehensive “portfolio approach’’ of investments. “The US has already ceded a lot of renewables production to other countries,’’ Gallagher said in an e-mail. “It could get it back through consistent, stable, aligned policies. I’m not hopeful. I don’t think the US is that far behind innovation-wise, but the problem is that we are not ‘learning by doing’ as much as we should. The longer that happens, the more we will fundamentally fall behind and then we will be in a catch-up mode.’’

The rest here.