LA Weekly

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“The policy challenge is to act in a serious and sensible way, given the limits of our knowledge. While scientific uncertainties remain, we can begin now to address the factors that contribute to climate change.”

--President George W. Bush, June 11, 2001

Speculation abounds in newspapers around the globe as to just how for George W. Bush, in tomorrow’s State of the Union address, will go in acknowledging that the climate is changing, and what he will propose to try to stop it. Or if he’ll acknowledge it at all. Or if he’ll try to stop it. What’s bugging me is that so many people are talking like he hasn’t acknowledged it before.

In fact, that’s about all he’s done.

“I've asked my advisors to consider approaches to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including those that tap the power of markets, help realize the promise of technology and ensure the widest possible global participation….Our actions should be measured as we learn more from science and build on it.”

--President George Bush, May 18, 2005

I don't need to remind anyone that this is the same White House that warned NASA in 2004 that “all climate-related press releases” will be reviewed; the same White House that established a committee on climate change and then, as we learned when Rick Piltz resigned from the Climate Change Science Program in 2005, allowed a former oil industry lobbyist named Phil Cooney to rewrite scientific results; the same White House, in fact, that cut NASA’s funding for climate change research by nearly a quarter since 2004.

If he can't lay out a plan for mandatory caps on emissions in the future, as California has done under Schwarzenegger, the least Bush could do might be to introduce some sort of cap-and-trade scheme to encourage private businesses and utilities to reduce emissions of CO2. Cap’n trade means that if one entity spews more than a certain legally prescribed limit of greenhouse gases, it can buy credits from a company that puts out less than the legal limit. It’s a little like saying I can take long, hot showers because my neighbor rides his bike to work, or because I compost I get to drive a Hummer (or I can drive a Hummer because I run a bike shop – okay, it’s only an H3, and it's the best bike shop in Hollywood, but still), or, my favorite, from my friend Debbie:

“I’m a vegan lesbian who doesn’t own a car. I can club baby seals if I want to.”

(The problem, of course, is that my neighbor is going to ride his bike to work whether or not I squander water.)

But Tony Snow assures us today that while "there has been some talk about, sort of, binding economy-wide carbon caps in the speech, but they are not part of the President's proposal."

And Bill Kovacs of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, says the CattleNetwork, thinks that “he's going to hit climate change from a technological point of view," like with those hydrogen cars we're all lining up to drive.

As Bush plays his, uh, liar as the world burns (as illustrated on the cover of this week’s New Yorker), the CEOs of a gaggle of non-usual-suspect corporations (like Alcoa and Dupont) have come out with their own collective plan to slow climate change. It’s cap-and-trade based, but does call for Congress to establish a program in which “the offset must be environmentally additional” – in other words, you can only buy credits from someone who has actually reduced his carbon emissions to get credits.

And while it’s short on specifics, it does demand that the White House introduce a mandatory (albeit flexible) program to stem the flow of carbon into the atmosphere in the very near future. Best of all, it makes the point my recent blog commenter corinth along with Amory Lovins (recently profiled in the New Yorker), have made before:

"In our view, the climate change challenge will create more opportunities than risks for the U.S. economy. Indeed, addressing climate change will require innovations that increase energy efficiency, creating new markets."

And at least, at long last, only a few straggling nutcases dispute that climate change is real and caused by man. They know who they are, and their names will not darken this blog again.

"[T]he forests are disappearing one by one, the rivers are polluted, wildlife is becoming extinct, the climate is changing for the worse, every day the planet gets poorer and uglier. It's a disaster!"

--Astrov, in Uncle Vanya, by Anton Chekhov, 1896

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