The word of the day is green. Green this, green that. It all sounds good, but is it meaningful without a national strategy?

Long Islanders are all talking the green game. Our two county executives, Nassau's Suozzi and Suffolk's Levy, have embarked on ambitious plans to reduce emissions and be green by converting Levittown into the first green suburban community, and making the new Yaphank jail as energy efficient as possible. Towns like Brookhaven and Babylon are adopting Energy Star housing codes which require new homes to be Energy Star compliant, perhaps reducing the average new home's electric and heating usage by 25 percent.

And, LIPA's chief, and my successor, is looking at whether or not to repower one or more National Grid power plants to increase capacity and reduce emissions - a laudable goal, for sure.

Yet, when it comes to a national energy plan and what the greening of America might mean, there's very little going on other than pledges by some of the presidential candidates to spend several hundred billion dollars on the "Greening of America."

For instance, one of America's major initiatives over the past five years is adding percentages of ethanol to gasoline. The argument goes that ethanol will make gasoline cleaner, more efficient, thus, reducing our dependence on foreign oil.

The problem is that ethanol may not be the right green strategy after all. New research indicates that the production of ethanol may create more emissions than the savings we are seeing in the mixture of ethanol with gasoline. And, the scarcity of corn (which is being used to produce ethanol) is hurting other sectors of the economy, especially in the production of food products like flour, baked goods, etc.

There are so many other questions out there that need national answers. Are biofuels in general really worth the cost to the environment and the economy? Does wind power cut it when you compare the rising cost of oil with the construction costs of a large scale wind farm? Can we make more effective use of photovoltaics, lowering the price and producing solar energy in bulk for the grid? And, how much do we need to spend on energy efficiency to make it really effective without blowing a gaping hole in our gas and electric bills?

This nation will be better served if our candidates spend more time proposing the development of a national Green Energy Agenda. Simply saying you're Green doesn't make it so.