Richard B. Simon
April 17, 2008
President Bush today announced his new goal for dealing with the crisis of looming catastrophic climate change:
"Today, I'm announcing a new national goal: to stop the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2025."
To put it plainly, what he is proposing is that we continue to increase the amount of carbon dioxide we are dumping into the atmosphere -- chiefly from burning fossil fuels -- for another seventeen years.
Then, seventeen years from now, when Generation X begins to collect social security, we will stop increasing the amount of carbon (and other greenhouse gases) we are dumping into the atmosphere, and start thinking about emissions reductions.
That's the bottom line, and as usual, the bottom line looks very good if you're in the business of selling products -- oil, gasoline, natural gas, and coal -- which, when used correctly, cause global warming.
But if you're interested in avoiding the spread of tropical diseases into temperate climates, catastrophic storms, drought (and the attendant shortages in freshwater resources), melting polar ice cap and therefore rising sea levels (and, once more, a decline in freshwater resources), you're out of luck.
It could not be more clear that Job One for this Administration has been to prevent action to stave off this looming disaster, in favor of protecting the profits of his family, friends, and political allies in the energy industries.
The reason Bush is addressing global warming at all, by the White House's own admission, is to try to prevent the Congress and the next President from acting to curb greenhouse gas emissions in real ways.
We need to reduce actual greenhouse gas emissions, and we need to do it now.
It is most likely already too late -- thanks to nearly eight years now of inaction bought by the good folks at Exxon Mobil -- to stave off drastic climate change.
The question at this point is to what degree we can limit the intensity of the catastrophic failure of the earth's natural carbon burial cycle, and allow humans to continue to live an existence that we would consider, by 20th century standards, remotely normal.
In other words, are we going to be able to adapt and move inland, to where the new coastlines will be, or are we going to have to relocate, as a species, to the poles -- as James Lovelock suggests is already the case. Will we be able to reverse the greenhouse effect, and start burying carbon in massive quantities of megatons per year, or are we going to continue to bring on a heat age that will render croplands barren deserts, and mountain streams hard pack gullies? And will we be able to then adapt to the next phase of climate in a way that is relatively orderly, or will the coming generations spend their lives locked in resource wars, over not just oil and natural gas, but over water, and soil, and land?
Bush argued today that decisions over how to deal with regulating greenhouse gases should not be made by "unelected bureaucrats and judges." That's because even a Supreme Court stacked with his ideological allies -- including two of his own appointees, one of whom is an Exxon shareholder -- decided that the Clean Air Act does require the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases.
"Unelected bureaucrats" of course is Bushspeak code for "scientists" and "career professionals" in the Environmental Protection Agency who have spent years, decades even, figuring how best to care for the natural environment, which is the wellspring of all the resources that are the foundation of the American Economy.
If you're growing corn, you need soil, and you need water. If you're manufacturing silicon chips, well, you also need water. And if you're doing just about anything else, you need workers -- and workers tend to run on food and water. And so if the climate shifts so that perfect climate that makes the American breadbasket the fertile crescent of North America winds up in Canada, on the Canadian Shield, where the soil is not fit for growing much, you're pretty much out of the basic fuel you need to run an economy: food. To quote the economist Eric Davidson, you can't eat GNP.
Bush is arguing, of course, that the people who should be deciding how we deal with this crisis are politicians -- specifically Republican politicians who have bought into the energy industries' agenda (or, rather, vice-versa -- they have been bought by the energy industries, who then set the agenda).
And look how far we've come under a paradigm in which the energy and auto industries make the rules -- auto makers will be required to build car that get 35 miles per gallon of gasoline, on average across their fleets. That's a meager increase in fuel economy standards that happened only after twenty years of inaction to increase the efficiency of the American auto fleet.
(A 1906 Model T Ford, by the way, got 13-21 miles per gallon. So in over a hundred years, we've managed to increase fuel economy -- but not by much. That's the range of a modern SUV.)
The new fuel economy standards require that 35 mpg target be met by 2020 -- twelve years from now.
Bush also boasts that "In 2009 alone, the government and the private sector plan to dedicate nearly a billion dollars to clean coal research and development."
Never mind that he's talking about a "plan" to "dedicate" funds that doesn't take effect until after he's left office; we spend that same billion dollars in Iraq in three days. Not considering the debt service on the interest our grandchildren will be paying to Chinese bankers.
And what does ten billion dollars per month accomplish in Iraq? Well, it's supposed to be ensuring that America continues to have access to Iraq's petroleum resources.
But it also guarantees that that's another ten billion dollars that won't be spent building wind farms, covering the nation's rooftops with solar panels, perfecting the hydrogen fuel cell (which can run on hydrogen electrolyzed from water, using any energy source, including photovoltaic solar or hamsters on treadmills), updating the energy grid, or converting the nation's fueling stations to run hydrogen.
George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four that the purpose of Oceania's perpetual war was to destroy capital, to prevent the masses from becoming prosperous, for if prosperous then they would become educated; if educated, then they would challenge the existing power structure, which was a pseudo-socialist oligarchy.
The purpose of the oligarchy was simple: to maintain its own grip on power, indefinitely.
And in our world, we have the President of the United States, having fought tooth and nail, all the way to the Supreme Court -- whose decisions are gold, the ultimate in legal recourse, beyond which there is no recourse -- arguing that it is not the job of the Environmental Protection Agency to protect the environment. And he lost.
Now the man who is President because of a Supreme Court decision -- which his rival, with an eye toward both grace and a respect for the primacy of the rule of law in America, accepted -- is arguing that if the Supreme Court decides that the Environmental Protection Agency is tasked by the Clean Air Act, as the highest court in the land interprets it, then, Houston, we have a problem.
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."
Dingell, of course, is the Democratic Representative from Detroit, the auto industry's man in Congress, who has been largely responsible for keeping US auto fuel economy roughly in line with that of the earliest twentieth century. That was to protect jobs, we were told. Talk about a glorious mess -- now the US automakers, having bet all their chips on the gas-guzzling SUV, are shedding jobs by the tens of thousands.
And Bush is now arguing that taking action on global warming will cause jobs to go overseas. Even as he tries to steamroll Congress into fast-tracking a new free trade agreement with Colombia that is designed to do exactly that.
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Here's Dan Froomkin's pre-speech coverage from the Washington Post.
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