14 February 2002
Steve Cochran, Joe Goffman
Environmental Defense
The Bush administration calls its proposal for addressing the greenhouse pollution that is already causing global climate change "bold" and "new." Unfortunately, a truly "bold" plan would not include as its target continued increases of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Yet this is what the President's plan does.
Equally unfortunate, the Bush administration's "greenhouse gas intensity" policy contains no new plan, no new requirement, and no new strategy whatsoever that would bring about changes from the current U.S. trend of steadily increasing greenhouse gas emissions. How then, will the U.S. achieve even a lessening of emissions increases?
Background
The United States is the world's largest emitter of greenhouse pollution. It is important however to realize that while U.S. emissions have grown by a hefty 12% in the past decade, the greenhouse gas intensity of our U.S. economy -- not the nation's total emissions, but its emissions per unit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) -- has actually declined by 15%. This improvement in greenhouse gas intensity has occurred under existing voluntary programs that are virtually no different from what the President outlined today. The U.S. is already doing -- and has been doing for nearly 10 years -- essentially what the President is claiming as a "new" initiative, as the pollution that causes climates change is continuing to increase.
Even during President Bush's tenure as Governor of Texas his voluntary air pollution proposals failed so badly in reducing emissions that the state had to quickly replace them with mandatory programs.
So, while today's proposal sounds positive, in fact, as the attached graphs illustrate, it is most likely to result in emissions levels that are virtually no different from what the government was already predicting, and what existing policies were already producing.
Even under the most optimistic projections from the administration proposal, total actual emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere will increase by at least 12% over the next decade.
Climate change is an urgent challenge. It demands not rhetoric disguising inaction, but real reductions in total emissions of greenhouse gases. The administration's "bold new strategy" would not change current trends of the largest man-made increases in greenhouse gas emissions the globe has ever seen.