by Mark Silva
President Bush, who has called on the nation’s leading industrial powers to join the U.S. in a commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions – short of the mutual cap on emissions that the Bush administration has refused to accept with the Kyoto Protocol – is playing his cards for the annual G-8 summit.
“Over the past seven years, my administration has taken a rational, balanced approach to these serious challenges,” Bush will maintain in an address on climate change today. “We believe we need to protect our environment. We believe we need to strengthen our energy security. We believe we need to grow our economy. And we believe the only way to achieve these goals is through continued advances in technology.
Critics claim that Bush’s goal of capping the growth in U.S. emissions by 2025 is weak and an ineffective approach to a more immediate crisis
“After squandering seven years, President Bush still refuses to respond to alarm bells. His strategy announced today is like trying to douse a 10-alarm fire with a garden hose—it is completely inadequate,” says Daniel Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Democratic-leaning Center for American Progress.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, said today: “The [resident’s plan to have America stand by while greenhouse gases reach dangerous levels and threaten America and the world is worse than doing nothing – it is the height of irresponsibility.”
Friends of the Earth President Brent Blackwelder said this: “The idea that President Bush is serious about fighting global warming is laughable… This is the last whimper from an increasingly irrelevant president. Bush will be gone in a matter of months and our country will then finally have an opportunity to show the leadership the world has been calling for.”Bush maintains that the U.S. is “on track” toward reducing its own greenhouse gas intensity by 18 percent through 2012.
The president has called on the members of the Group of Eight industrial nations and others, such as China and India, to agree by the end of this year to a joint commitment of setting individual national goals for the reduction of emissions. The G-8 will be meeting this summer in Japan.
“I have put our nation on a path to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of our greenhouse gas emissions,” Bush plans to say.
Today, Bush is outlining a “new national goal:” To stop the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2025.
This includes calling on Congress to approve a new fuel economy standard for automobiles of 35 miles per gallon by 2020 and requiring fuel producers to supply at least 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel by 2022.
“Taken together,” he plans to say, “these landmark actions will prevent billions of metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from entering the atmosphere.
“I believe that congressional debate should be guided by certain core principles and a clear appreciation that there is a wrong way and a right way to approach reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” the president will say, according to excerpts of remarks released by the White House. “Bad legislation would impose tremendous costs on our economy and American families without accomplishing the important climate change goals we share.
“The wrong way is to raise taxes, duplicate mandates, or demand sudden and drastic emissions cuts that have no chance of being realized and every chance of hurting our economy,” he will say. “The right way is to set realistic goals for reducing emissions consistent with advances in technology, while increasing our energy security and ensuring our economy can continue to prosper and grow.
“The strategy I have laid out today shows faith in the ingenuity and enterprise of the American people – and that is one resource that will never run out,” Bush plans to say. ” am confident that with sensible and balanced policies from Washington, American innovators and entrepreneurs will pioneer a new generation of technology that improves our environment, strengthens our economy, and continues to amaze the world.”
Arriving, as it did, on this day of Pope Benedict’s visit to the White House, the president’s new policy drew a pointed criticism from Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters:
“Erlier this year, the Vatican announced that polluting is a sin, and we had hoped that Pope Benedict could convince President Bush to take meaningful action to reduce global warming.
“The pesident may have confessed that global warming is a problem, but his inadequate proposals show that he’d rather kiss the rings of oil executives than listen to the Holy Father and every reputable climate scientist in the world. This proposal is too little, too late to effectively reverse global warming and too little, too late to save this prsident’s record of failure.”
