As had been widely expected, President Obama’s State of the Union speech focused largely on U.S. economic health. The president made clean energy, education, and infrastructure the three legs of the U.S. economic stool, if you’ll pardon the strained metaphor. It is cheering to see clean energy remain a top priority for the White House, given that the real legislative debate this year will be over which government initiatives to cut.

It is typical for presidents to make dramatic declarations about shifting the United States to alternative energy sources, usually with a goal of ending U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Obama chose a different tack, with the emphasis on creating green jobs, but the end game is the same. Unfortunately, these declarations, and the energy initiatives launched to achieve them, tend to be fairly aspirational, partly because the target dates are quite far in the future and partly because the goals involve things that the U.S. government simply cannot control, like petroleum demand or consumer preferences. President Obama was guilty of this as well. For example, he reiterated his call to have one million advanced technology vehicles on U.S. roads by 2015. This sounds terrific, but is clearly not something that government could directly achieve without some sort of draconian regulation. Instead, the White House is proposing an array of tax incentives and R&D, the usual policies designed to lead the market in a certain direction, but which are no guarantee.

Which is why I took note when the president proposed ending taxpayer subsidies to oil companies. This is actually something the government could do if it wanted to. The question is, does it? This idea has already been proposed. It was in the past two White House budgets, but a 2010 Senate amendment that would have eliminated around $35 billion in oil company tax breaks was defeated with both Democratic and Republican opposition. So, will such a proposal see any traction in the new budget conscious Congress? It seems likely that many of the same legislators will oppose it as a threat to the U.S. oil industry. In addition, the president has offered it up not as a way to cut government spending, but rather as a way to pay for new clean energy technologies. It is not at all clear that, if the new Congress is open to eliminating subsidies, there will be any interest in doing so simply to transfer the savings to other government programs.

But it is also not clear whether there would be any direct benefits to alternative fuels. It may be that there would be long-term gas price increases, if oil companies chose to pass along increased exploration costs to consumers. This could make certain alternative fuels more competitive, as this Pike Research analysis shows certain alternative technologies running close to gasoline on a per mile basis already.

But in the end, it seems that this proposal, like so many other government energy initiatives, is really about pushing more funding support to alternative technologies in the hopes that it will drive down costs and eventually create a sustainable commercial market. So even this concrete policy starts to look a little more vague and aspirational as it is closely examined. This is not an argument against it but does underline again the difficulty of moving our complex energy economy in a desired direction.