President Bush giving the State of the Union address (Photo courtesy of the US Department of State)
President George Bush is proposing the next
step for the country to deal with greenhouse emissions
contributing to climate change. Lester Graham reports
the President’s proposal is not popular with everyone:
Transcript
President George Bush is proposing the next
step for the country to deal with greenhouse emissions
contributing to climate change. Lester Graham reports
the President’s proposal is not popular with everyone:
President Bush says he’s following his plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions that he first outlined in 2002.
“I put our nation on a path to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of our
greenhouse gas emissions. In 2002 I announced our first step: to reduce America’s
greenhouse gas intensity by 18% through 2012.”
That’s not an 18% reduction in greenhouse gases, but rather a slowing in growth of the
gases. President Bush says it’s time to look at the next step.
“Today I’m announcing a new national goal: to stop the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas
emissions by 2025.”
The President says some of the steps to get to that point are already in place: a
phased in new mileage standard for vehicles; increased use of renewable fuels such as
cellulosic ethanol, wind, and solar; nuclear, and clean coal power generation; and more
efficient appliances.
Some environmentalists say this move is a non-starter. Eileen Claussen is the
President of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
“You could say ‘More of the same.’ Or, you could say that it’s worse because actually his
proposal is to let emissions grow for another 17 years.”
Claussen says greenhouse gas restrictions need to be put in place much sooner.
While the environmentalists think the President’s proposal is weak and offers few
specifics, conservatives think the President is reversing his course and headed for
economic trouble.
The conservative think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute says this move will
destroy President Bush’s legacy.
Marlo Lewis is a Senior Fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He says
capping CO2 won’t do enough to stop or even slow global warming and it will end up
being disastrous for the economy.
“It’s all cost for no benefit.”
Lewis expects a cap-and-trade program for greenhouse emissions will be put in place if
the President continues down this path. Lewis says if that happens, quote, “climate change alarmists” will never let it stop.
“Until basically you’re trying to run your economy on wind turbines and solar panels
which simply would not work.”
He says if the environmentalists want a future without fossil fuels and their accompanying
greenhouse gases, the country will need to dam up rivers for hydro-power and build a
bunch of new nuclear power plants.
With only nine months left in President Bush’s final term in office, the President’s
proposals might not mean that much. Eileen Claussen with the Pew Center on Global
Climate Change believes other politicians are well ahead of the President on the issue.
“The good news is that I’m not sure that his strategy here is really relevant. We have a
Congress that is working hard to come up with a bill that would cap emissions. We
have governors in 23 states who are working on cap-and-trade programs to limit their
emissions. We’ve got three presidential candidates – all three – who support capping
emissions.”
President Bush announced his plan to deal with greenhouse gases in preparation for
the G-8 summit of industrialized nations this summer. The President says, there, they plan to come up with
a plan that will call for rapidly developing nations such as China and India to make the
same kind of restrictions as the U.S. so that the United States is not at an economic
disadvantage.
For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.