The most striking line this year from President George W. Bush’s state of the union speech was when the former oil and gas executive warned: “America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.”

He pledged to break this addiction “through technology,” not constraining demand, promising to increase research into alternative energy. He looked to a future of fuel using “wood chips and stalks or switch grass,” and set the goal of these technologies helping to “replace more than 75 per cent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025”.