I saw it for myself: President Bush directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), along with the departments of energy, transportation, and agriculture to come up with a plan to cut global warming emissions by the year 2008. As for the details…well, they get pretty vague.
Bush spoke a lot about fuel consumption, again alluding to our nation’s addiction to oil, but never called for a specific increase in vehicle efficiency standards. He repeated his State of the Union proposal to replace 20 percent of the nation’s gasoline with alternative fuels in the next 10 years. He summed up his plan:
"When it comes to the environment and energy, the American people expect common sense, and they expect action.”
But apparently not too much action: The Washington Post reports that U.S. negotiators are attempting to weaken a climate change declaration set to be unveiled at next month’s G-8 summit of the world’s top industrial nations. Specifically, U.S. officials want to strike a sentence about energy efficiency,
“Therefore we will increase the energy efficiency of our economies so that energy consumption by 2020 will be at least 30 percent lower compared to a business-as-usual scenario”
and language to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. Furthermore, the U.S. proposed striking an opening line that declares
“…tackling climate change is an imperative, not a choice. We firmly agree that resolute and concerted international action is urgently needed in order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and sustain our common basis of living."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and newly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy are all pushing for a strong statement on global warming solutions.
The heads of the U.S. departments called on by President Bush to come up with a plan said a draft should be available by this fall. But will it be real action? While the President is calling for change, his representatives at the UN are doing everything they can to stall it. We know political rhetoric when we see it, Mr. Bush. Fool us once…