{"id":10978,"date":"2007-06-01T11:15:35","date_gmt":"2007-06-01T15:15:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/10978.html"},"modified":"2007-06-01T11:15:35","modified_gmt":"2007-06-01T15:15:35","slug":"good-news-bad-news-on-bushs-new-global-warming-proposal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/good-news-bad-news-on-bushs-new-global-warming-proposal\/","title":{"rendered":"Good news, bad news on Bush’s new global warming proposal"},"content":{"rendered":"

First, the good news. The president’s comments yesterday were at least a mild shift in rhetorical direction. He believes there should be “goals<\/a>” for reducing emissions. Believe it or not, this represented a change in administration policy, which has a) questioned whether pollutants were responsible for climate change; and b) been willing to allow emissions to grow, so long as they did not exceed<\/a> the rate of economic growth..<\/p>\n

It’s probably the soft bigotry of low expectations, but this was at least mildly heartening. Then, of course, there’s the bad news: his proposal is a joke<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Will the new framework consist of binding commitments or voluntary commitments?” asked CBS News’s Jim Axelrod.<\/p>\n

“In this instance, you have a long-term, aspirational goal,” [Jim Connaughton, the president’s adviser on the environment] answered.<\/p>\n

Aspirational goal? Like having the body you want without diet or exercise? Or getting rich without working?<\/p>\n

“I’m confused,” Axelrod said. “Does that mean there will be targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions, and that everybody will be making binding commitments?”<\/p>\n

“The commitment at the international level will be to a long-term, aspirational goal,” the Bush aide repeated.<\/p>\n

Axelrod had his answer. “Voluntary,” he concluded.<\/p>\n

“Well,” said Connaughton, “I want to be careful about the word ‘voluntary.'”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Connaughton can be as “careful” as he wants, but as Dana Milbank explained<\/a>, the new White House proposal includes “no concrete targets or dates, no enforcement mechanism and no penalties for noncompliance. It also wouldn’t take effect until four years after Bush leaves office. It was, rather, a call to spend the final 18 months of the Bush presidency forming an aspirational goal.”
\n
\nOf course, it also didn’t help that Bush’s top man at NASA was busy stepping all over the president’s message.<\/p>\n

Just as President Bush was about to wheel out his “new international climate change framework,” the NASA administrator, Michael Griffin, declared that there is no need to take action against global warming.<\/p>\n

“Whether that is a long-term concern or not, I can’t say,” he said in an interview with National Public Radio, adding: “I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with.” In fact, Griffin found it “rather arrogant” to suggest that global warming is a bad thing.<\/p>\n

A couple of hours after the broadcast, Griffin’s boss took the stage at the Ronald Reagan Building to endorse just such arrogance — an initiative aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. “The United States takes this issue seriously,” Bush said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If Bush hadn’t been following Griffin’s approach<\/a> for the last six-and-a-half years, his comments might have been more credible.<\/p>\n

As for when we might expect to see some progress on this front, after years of denials and delays, don’t hold your breath. A reporter asked Connaughton when, under Bush’s plan, we might “see the world actually cutting greenhouse gas emissions.”<\/p>\n

“This is the hard conversation we have to have,” he said.<\/p>\n

He managed to say it with a straight face. I was actually impressed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First, the good news. The president’s comments yesterday were at least a mild shift in rhetorical direction. He believes there should be “goals” for reducing emissions. Believe it or not, this represented a change in administration policy, which has a) questioned whether pollutants were responsible for climate change; and b) been willing to allow emissions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10978\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}