The Freedom Fuel initiative is a supplement to last year's "FreedomCAR" program, which, in turn, is a successor to Clinton's Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, launched in 1993. Between FreedomCAR and Freedom Fuel, Bush has proposed spending $1.7 billion pursuing hydrogen fuel-cell alternatives over the next five years.

But to actually move the economy to a hydrogen base would be a massive undertaking. It isn't just a question of making a safe, clean car that performs as smoothly as a gas-powered one. Getting hydrogen fuel to consumers will be a huge infrastructural problem. And there's some doubt as to whether $1.7 billion is enough to make a dent.

"It's better than nothing, but it's also kind of a drop in the bucket," says Mark Bunger, senior auto-industry analyst for Forrester Research. "The number -- $1.2 billion -- that's about what it would cost an automaker to develop one new car, like a Ford Taurus. This is not such a shot in the arm that it's going to hurtle the Americans ahead of the Japanese."

"It's definitely not enough money," says David Friedman, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "If the government was really serious about getting hydrogen out there as soon as possible, there would be at least another zero, if not two zeroes, at the end of their figure."

"There's no guarantee that we're going to see fuel-cell vehicles out of this," says Brendan Bell, a spokesperson for the Sierra Club. "We would love this plan if there was a timeline for concrete results we could see, not just a blanket R&D tax subsidy."

That's not just a typical environmentalist's stab at Bush. The Clinton-era Partnership began with the goal of tripling the fuel economy of a family car, getting to an 80-miles-per-gallon prototype within a decade. Experimenting with diesel hybrids and early fuel cells, "they got two 70-mpg prototypes," said Friedman. But it's been a decade, and there's still no American hybrid on the road.

In the meantime, Toyota and Honda have brought hybrids such as the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic Hybrid to the mass market, as well as manufactured the first fuel-cell vehicles.

The frustrating part for many critics worried about global warming, foreign oil dependence and a host of environmental issues affected by fossil fuel resource extraction is that there are plenty of things Bush could do now that would make an impact. These critics see Freedom Fuel as a relatively modest fiscal commitment to a technology that isn't going to be here anytime soon, while the many steps that could be taken to improve the fuel efficiency of cars today with already existing technologies, at no cost to the government, are ignored.

"We share the president's vision of a hydrogen future, but energy security and oil dependence is a problem today," says Michelle Robinson, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group currently leading a campaign to petition the Bush administration to raise fuel economy standards higher than the modest increases recently announced.

The Sierra Club has its own Freedom Package of options consumers can request for technologies that exist now to make cars more fuel efficient, such as "continuously variable automatic transmissions" and "integrated 'idle-off' starter-generators." A significant rise in fuel economy standards could also push in the same direction, but that's not the current administration's approach.

Bush even couched his Freedom Fuel proposal as a reaction against regulation: "In this century, the greatest environmental progress will come about not through endless lawsuits or command-and-control regulations, but through technology and innovation," he declared. That's a backhanded jab at the likes of California, which for more than a decade has tried to mandate greener cars through its Zero Emission Vehicle program. The Bush administration has sided with automakers challenging California's laws in federal court.

Drivers of the most fuel-efficient cars on the road today -- electric cars and hybrid vehicles -- are skeptical that the president is really pulling for cleaner cars. Chris Yoder, 40, a Pasadena, Calif., Prius driver, who previously drove a now-discontinued EV1 electric car, goes so far as to refer to fuel cells as "fool cells."

In his view, promises of a hydrogen future are just an excuse for marketing more gas guzzlers today. "It's yet another dodge by the auto companies to not produce clean, efficient vehicles," says Yoder.

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