Hours before President Obama was to give his much-ballyhooed State of the Union address, carefully selected excerpts were teased out. "This is our Sputnik moment" was released, leading to the expectation that it would be a major theme.

When the line was delivered on page three of an eleven-page text, like most of the speech, it fell flat.

Referring to the Soviet’s successful Sputnik 1 Satellite launch on October 4, 1957, most Americans today—including President Obama—have no conscious knowledge of what a "Sputnik moment" might be. Only those over seventy years old likely remember the shock of discovering that the Soviets had beat us into space. That "moment" drove us into vast spending on research and technology.

Drawing the American/Soviet competition into the current narrative brings a different race and a different President to mind—more recent than 1957, but still beyond the memory of most. A generation ago, during his second inaugural address in 1985, President Reagan put the Soviets on alert with his statement about the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) saying it would "render nuclear weapons obsolete."

SDI, also known as Star Wars, shifted the Soviets' focus from the deployment of the Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles in Western Europe, to gathering military intelligence, including that on "American policy on the militarization of space." Throughout the rest of the decade, the Soviets spent time, energy, and money—as much as tens of billions of rubles—on a program based on dead-end science, misinformation, and propaganda. Reagan’s goal was to break the Soviet Union, and a major tool was economic. While there is debate as to whether or not Reagan’s efforts truly caused the Soviet Union to hit the wall, he undoubtedly brought it closer.

The Soviets bought into the propaganda that a space war existed, and as a result, they spent time and money on information-gathering and defense-building that helped push them to the wall.

Instead of looking back to the Soviet/American space war launched by Sputnik, we should review the American/Soviet misperception campaign of SDI.

In his speech, President Obama laid out a goal of having 80% percent of our energy from renewables by 2035. He talked about solar shingles, biofuels, and electric cars. He touted California Institute of Technology’s attempts to develop a way to turn sunlight and water into fuel. Like the Soviets, he wants "more research and incentives" and he wants Congress to be willing to "pay for it."

Beside the fact that reaching the renewable goal will be virtually impossible from a raw-materials perspective; it is a huge drain on the economy. We have already spent billions on ethanol and have just pledged to throw good money after bad by renewing the ethanol subsidies—totaling $7 billion in 2011 alone. Likewise, wind and solar energy receive large subsidies. These "renewables" are still not viable after decades of "investment."

Not only are they not viable, they cost taxpayers millions—$58 million in the case of Evergreen Solar. Despite favor bestowed on companies like Evergreen Solar from state and federal incentives and the $58 million they’ve received from the State of Massachusetts in 2007, they announced earlier this month that they will shut down their Massachusetts plant and lay off 800 workers. Since opening in 1994, they have lost a cumulative $685 million. Massachusetts’ Governor Patrick believes he can get some of the taxpayers' money back but Evergreen Solar says it does not owe more than $4 million. From whom do the remaining $54 million come?

Why are we continuing to pour money into such technologies? Is it because we are in a race, or is it propaganda designed to break us?

The whole clean-energy campaign is based on two bits of misinformation repeated over-and-over again to the point that people start to believe them to be true.

The first is that we have an energy shortage and we must find new sources—even when they are many times more expensive. The second is that we have a climate crisis that is caused by man and that man can fix by not using the abundant, but demonized, energy sources that we have.

Star Wars’ lesson for today is that the assumed misperceptions caused the Soviets to spend when they did not need to and expedited their demise. Instead of borrowing money for increased government "investment" on a "Sputnik moment," America needs to quit the propaganda-induced spending based on dead-end science and maximize our own natural resources.