The Bush administration’s failure to participate in a global effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions is a head-in-the-sands mistake, the sooner reversed the better.
In his State of the Union address last week, President Bush referred to climate change as a “serious challenge.” It was a lame acknowledgment but a welcome one, because for years he had simply dismissed concerns over global warming, saying not enough was known to do anything.
The president should follow up his remark with a coherent plan to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.
That was never more clear after a United Nations panel of climate scientists released a draft report that found the Earth’s climate is changing faster than anyone had thought and seems destined to get much worse. The group of 2,500 experts has predicted more droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, a sharp rise in sea levels and continued ice- cap melting. By 2100, the environment will have sustained serious damage.
It says there is at least a 90 percent probability that industrialized society is to blame for at least the last 50 years of warming.
Also on Tuesday, the U.S. House of Representatives discussed global warming, and the news was disturbing. Two well-known advocacy groups appeared before a House panel to provide evidence that senior Bush administration officials had attempted to mislead the public by injecting unfounded doubt into global warming science.
The Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Project surveyed hundreds of federal scientists and said many of them reported they were pressured to remove the words “global warming” and “climate change” from their reports. Forty- three percent of them reported their work had been edited to change the meaning of their findings.
It is in this context that we behold the news that President Bush signed a new executive order last week enhancing White House power to scrutinize government policy. The president has declared that each federal agency must designate a political appointee to vet new rules and policies and ensure they jibe with presidential leanings in areas such as the environment and workplace regulation.
We worry that the political officials will distort agency efforts and that regulators and researchers will be intimidated by the prospect of political interference.
U.N. officials called Tuesday for an international climate-change summit and we would like to see President Bush enter the mainstream effort to confront this serious challenge. The world was listening to the president’s speech last week and saw his remark on global warming as an emerging opportunity. European Union policy calls for sharp cuts in carbon emissions and the United States should join the effort.
It’s a chance for the president to step up on an issue that could otherwise stain his legacy.
