Bush lies, climate dies

Or, hypocrisy through rose-colored glasses in the Rose Garden

As I blogged about earlier this week, President Bush is indeed doing a bait-and-switch with his proposal to reduce ever-so-slightly control the increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

The setting was different, but the dance and tune were just the same with Bush’s speech today in the Rose Garden.

The perceptive Dan Froomkin calls it Bush’s third fake-out,

“President Bush will endorse an ‘intermediate goal’ today for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but he will not put forward any specific legislation or proposal on how the goal should be met, White House officials said.”

INTERmediate, of course, isn’t immediate. And even intermediate ain’t happening without that missing specific legislation or proposal.

That “intermediate goal” translates as: do nothing until 2025, As Andrew Revkin reports, critics immediately said:

(Bush is) simply recasting existing economic and technological trends as change, that he was trying to derail congressional initiatives (promoted mainly by Democrats and a small cluster of moderate Republicans), and that he was continuing an eight-year pattern of delay in attacking the creeping, but momentous, climate problem.

It’s clear, by his continued use of the deliberately obscurantist and nonscientific phrase “greenhouse gas intensity,” that Bush doesn’t intend to do any more about this issue than he does about Iraq. And, at the same high cost.

More problems with the speech.
• Bush continues to promote the biofuels requirements of the new energy bill, despite it becoming clearer by the day the massive impact this will have on food prices and environmental quality.

• He continues to tout the 35mpg legislation for cars, even though it doesn’t have mandatory intermediate targets and so will have no bearing on car emissions until 2020.

(Sidebar note: Interesting he mentions gas mileage in terms of greenhouse gases, with the state of California’s suit over the Environmental Protection Agency’s denial of Calfornia’s CO2 waiver request in court as we speak.) And, speaking of that, Bush attacks those damned environmentally activist judges, including, it would seem, that liberal Supreme Court that says EPA has the power to regulate CO2 as a pollutant:

As we approach this challenge, we face a growing problem here at home. Some courts are taking laws written more than 30 years ago — to primarily address local and regional environmental effects — and applying them to global climate change. The Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act were never meant to regulate global climate. For example, under a Supreme Court decision last year, the Clean Air Act could be applied to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles. This would automatically trigger regulation under the Clean Air Act of greenhouse gases all across our economy — leading to what Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell last week called, “a glorious mess.”

No, it will trigger a glorious call to action.

• He’s sticking by his plan to only regulate power plants, as noted by continuing the quote just above:

If these laws are stretched beyond their original intent, they could override the programs Congress just adopted, and force the government to regulate more than just power plant emissions.

Exactly what’s needed, Mr. Preznit.

• “Clean” coal gets plenty of mention.

• Conservation doesn’t.

• Gas tax increases and other “sticks” get ruled out, despite that fact that, when he was Texas governor, Bush was perfectly fine with financial “sticks” of electricity deregulation, and had no problem with his Enron buddies gaming California’s system.

As for conservatives still complaining about the high cost of global warming, and Bush agreeing with them, this is another lie, on the par with lies about the true cost of oil, vs. the “nominal” $110/bbl cost that doesn’t include U.S. military expenditures, pollution, etc.

The cost of NOT addressing global warming include increased flooding, increased drought and likely decreases in food production in the U.S., just for starters.