Bush: US to halt greenhouse gas rise by 2025
WASHINGTON (AFP) — President George W. Bush Wednesday called for US greenhouse gas emissions to be curtailed from 2025, but was roundly accused of doing too little, too late against climate change.
Despite having abandoned the Kyoto treaty on global warming, Bush said the world's biggest polluting nation had shown it was serious about reducing growth in planet-heating gases such as carbon dioxide.
"Today, I am announcing a new national goal: to stop the growth of US greenhouse gas emissions by 2025," he said in a speech, without giving specific targets by which to reduce the emissions.
Bush said to reach the 2025 goal, "we will need to more rapidly slow the growth of power-sector greenhouse gas emissions so that they peak within 10 to 15 years, and decline thereafter."
But he did not detail new legal mandates on industry to bring down emissions, and warned Congress against passing new legislation that might "impose tremendous costs on our economy and American families."
Bush instead extolled the promise of new technology to clean up gas emissions, older technology like nuclear power and "clean coal," and a previously announced target to make US vehicles more fuel efficient.
The president's address, delivered in brilliant spring sunshine in the White House Rose Garden, came on the eve of a meeting of the world's major polluters in France Thursday and Friday.
Ministers from 16 economies that together account for 80 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions are gathering in Paris for the "Major Economies Meeting," the third in a series launched last September by Bush.
Kyoto's binding commitments, which Bush has rejected, expire in 2012. The president came belatedly to the climate change cause, and now stands accused of trying to ram through a diluted new regime that will focus on voluntary action rather than mandatory cuts.
Elizabeth Bast, director of international programs with Friends of the Earth, said Bush's 2025 goal was "clearly not enough to deal with the problem."
"It's definitely too little and way too late, after eight years of doing nothing," she told AFP.
"It's an effort to sidetrack what's going on in the international negotiations, and the rest of the world shouldn't be influenced by this given that the US administration is going to change soon."
The Sierra Club, the largest US environmental group, said Bush's plan to halt emissions growth was "woefully deficient."
"Scientists tell us that we need to cut total emissions at least 15-20 percent by 2020, and 80 percent by 2050, in order to prevent the most catastrophic effects of global warming," executive director Carl Pope said.
But Bush, having rejected Kyoto for its failure to apply binding gas targets on fast-growing China and India, said the United States would not take unilateral action that imperils US industry and jobs.
The United States supports a post-Kyoto regime that encompasses every major economy "and gives none a free ride," the president said, looking forward to climate change talks at a Group of Eight summit in Japan in July.
Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, said Bush had flunked the climate change challenge in his final year in office.
Pelosi said Bush should back efforts in Congress to "cap and trade" greenhouse gas emissions, along with individual efforts of states like California that his administration has fought in the courts.
"As we are honored by the visit of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, the president should heed his warnings about our moral responsibility to act, calling for a 'strong commitment to reverse those trends that risk making the situation of decay irreversible'," she said.
James Connaughton, chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality, said Bush was focused on realistic goals rather than "fancy rhetoric."
"I challenge any critic ... to show us a path that gets us further and faster than the president has proposed in a way that doesn't harm our economy," he told reporters.
