Thursday, 04.17.08

Blowing Smoke

Photo by Saul Loeb for AFP/Getty Images

George W. Bush sets new goals for U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions.

With a few choice puffs of presidential CO2 in the Rose Garden yesterday afternoon, President Bush extinguished any hopes that environmentalists may have had for a meaningful shift in his climate change policies. The president committed the United States to stopping the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. A decade ago, the United States signed the Kyoto Protocol, agreeing to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels between 2008-2012. You don't need a Harvard MBA to recognize that, compared with the second goal, the first is a walk in the park. Our greenhouse-gas emissions in 2006, for example, were about 15 percent higher than in 1990.

Of course, Kyoto is a bit of a green herring. Bush rightly objected to it because it didn't set binding cuts for developing giants like China and India, because its individual targets seemed to have more to do with politics than science, and because hitting them would impose huge costs on the U.S. economy. (My colleague Clive Crook argues that Bush's antipathy to Kyoto has actually helped keep alive its discredited approach.) But Bush's skepticism about the science of climate change is less forgivable. If "changes in the Earth's atmosphere…require much more analysis," as candidate Bush said in 1999, why did his administration regularly cut the budget of the U.S. consortium doing climate research? Maybe because the White House didn't like the analyses it was getting (which might explain why it chose to doctor them).

New technology, smart incentives, and generally market-based approaches all sound more appealing than mandated caps to curb emissions. But those measures, much less the "voluntary" cuts that the White House has advocated for the last seven years, won't ever work without sincere, sustained jawboning from the presidential bully pulpit that convinces people that a given goal is worth fighting for. Of course, maybe I'm just being pessimistic. You could argue that Bush's leadership is already working to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: thanks partly to a protracted war in the Middle East that has boosted gas prices and, er, a milder winter, the Environmental Protection Agency reported this year that emissions fell from 2005 to 2006 by 1.5 percent. Bring on that recession! — James Gibney

Filed Under: environment, global warming, science