The US government has mapped out a strategy for researching climate change and its causes over the next five years - studies that critics say are just a means to delay the toughest decisions on global warming until after President George W Bush leaves office. (AFP photo)...

Little George has come up with a global warming study that will ensure that nothing is done while he is president

It is sad, but the earth is going to take several decades to recover from the increasing pollution and global warming that will take place under the Bush. 

One has to wonder if Big George and Barbara instilled any kind of social morality and ethic into their boy.  He lives on a ranch in Texas but has no respect for the environment; go figure.

The reality is that one little man, one little warmonger, one little socio-pathic man is responsible for dumping more global warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than anyone can even calculate.  

I just ask myself, how can this be?

John WorldPeace
December 5,  2002

December 04, 2002

THE US government has mapped out a strategy for researching climate change and its causes over the next five years - studies that critics say are just a means to delay the toughest decisions on global warming until after President George W Bush leaves office.

The Bush administration strategy calls for more accurate projections of the potential economic impacts of climate policy changes and gives the White House more control over the research efforts of more than a dozen federal agencies. About 1200 scientists and government officials gathered today for the start of a three-day workshop at a Washington hotel to hear about the White House draft strategy and to suggest changes before it is published in final form by next April.

John Marburger, the president's science and technology adviser, said today at the meeting that the White House hoped to refocus the 13-year-old research program on providing data that could be used to shape a "clearly articulated policy ... that doesn't put the economy at risk".

For many climate experts, the administration's latest strategy reopens questions that most scientists considered already fairly settled. It also ignores the Environmental Protection Agency's published findings in 2000 from a decade-long federal assessment of potential impacts of climate change around the United States.

The new research plan, posted on the website of an interagency program led by the White House, asserts that people are clearly agents of environmental change but what is still unclear is whether human activities actually are causing changes such as global warming.

"It seems like they're reinventing the wheel because some people didn't like the direction indicated the last time the analysis was done," said Dan Lashof, science director for the climate program at the Natural Resources Defence Council, an environmental group.

"The overall thrust of this plan is to take a giant step backward and almost pretend that the last decade and findings by the scientific community don't exist," he added.

Bush has advocated voluntary measures for industry to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that many scientists blame for warming the atmosphere like a greenhouse.

Shortly after taking office, Bush rejected an international treaty negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 mandating reduction of those gases by industrial nations.

In June, he downplayed the significance of a White House-approved report his administration submitted to the United Nations that mostly blamed human activity for global warming but acknowledged lingering scientific uncertainties.

Five months into his presidency, Bush heard back from the National Academy of Sciences that global warming is caused at least partly by man-made pollution, and that it is a real problem and getting worse.

With that advice, the president felt he had "a basis of sound science on which decisions can be made", spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters in June 2001.

But 18 months later, the administration is now resisting calls for quick action and instead issuing the plan for more study.

The Associated Press

news.co.au

U.S.: Groups Sue Government Agency Over Global Warming 

WASHINGTON, Dec 5 (IPS) - Amid growing anger among environmentalists over the record and intentions of President George W. Bush, three major U.S. environmental groups said Thursday they are suing his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for failing to curb global warming.

The lawsuit by the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and the International Center for Technology Assessment (CTA) charges the EPA with violating the 1977 Clear Air Act by failing to limit air pollution caused by automobiles that ''may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare''.

Despite growing impacts of global warming on human health and the environment, the three groups charged, the EPA has steadfastly refused to control automobile emissions, which contribute to global warming.

''It's time for the Bush administration to get its head out of the sand,'' charged Joseph Mendelson, CTA's legal director. ''The EPA stalling tactics are doing real damage in the fight against global warming.''

The lawsuit marks the latest expression of rising frustration on the part of environmental activists over the administration's failure to act, despite a report by its own scientists last June that concluded that the burning of fossil fuels for industry and automobiles was contributing heavily to the climate change that will itself wreak havoc on natural ecosystems throughout the United States.

Environmentalists also fear future administration plans, particularly now that Republicans have gained control of both houses of Congress. Last year, much of the administration's energy plan, particularly its hopes of opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to drilling by U.S. energy companies, was held up by the Democratic majority in the Senate.

But Republican control of Congress should make it much easier for Bush to relax existing environmental laws and regulations over the coming two years, at the behest of energy and automobile companies and electrical utilities that contributed heavily to his presidential campaign in 2000.

In the Senate, for example, the new chairmen dealing with energy and the environment both support drilling in ANWR and have among the upper chamber's worst voting records on environmental protection.

In his first move since the elections, Bush proposed a substantial loosening of federal regulations under the Clean Air Act two weeks ago to permit old coal-fired power plants to upgrade their facilities without requiring them to install new anti-pollution equipment, as they must now do.

While the administration insisted that the change would encourage investment that would eventually result in cleaner air, environmentalists blasted the proposals as a major step back in the fight against air pollution, and a number of leading Democrats called for EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman to resign her post in protest.

Whitman, a former governor of New Jersey, has long urged Bush to toughen regulations governing the Clean Air Act and even to sign the Kyoto Protocol, the international accord that requires industrialized countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions some seven percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States currently accounts for about 25 percent of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions.

But Whitman has been largely sidelined by the administration. She even avoided appearing personally to announce the power-plant proposals as she would normally do, issuing a statement through her spokesperson instead.

Thursday's lawsuit was motivated by the EPA's failure to respond to a formal petition submitted to it three years ago that demanded the regulation of global warming pollutants under the Clear Air Act.

The EPA subsequently received some 50,000 comments on the petition, the vast majority of which strongly agreed that global warming should be addressed under those provisions of the Clean Air Act that require it to regulate air pollution that may endanger public health or welfare.

Yet, 18 months after the public-comment period closed, the EPA has yet to offer a formal response to the petition, let alone to enact rules regulating greenhouse-gas emissions as requested by the petitioners.

According to the lawsuit, which cites the government's own studies about possible impacts of global warming on ecosystems and human health, climate change is responsible for unstable weather patterns, floods, droughts, and outbreaks of tropical diseases, including the West Nile virus that raged through much of the eastern United States last summer.

Scientists says warming, if left unchecked, will cause potentially catastrophic rises in sea level, the melting of the polar icecaps, and the loss of unique ecosystems around the world.

''Under the Bush administration, the EPA has found time to weaken or threaten many crucial environmental protections that Americans take for granted,'' according to David Bookbinder, an attorney with the Sierra Club. ''But it can't find time to get serious about the most pressing environmental problem in the world's history.''

The lawsuit coincides with the launch this week of the administration's first phase of its strategy to deal with climate change, a meeting of hundreds of scientists here to map out a research plan designed to better assess the problem and more accurately predict the effects of certain policy changes.

But environmentalists and many of the scientists taking part in the exercise have said enough is known about the threat posed by global warming to warrant a decision to cap, if not reduce, U.S. emissions immediately.

''The Bush administration is asking for five more years of studies while the world is warming and regular people will pay the price,'' said Gary Cook, climate coordinator for Greenpeace.

''We are asking the courts to intervene and order the EPA to enforce U.S. environmental laws and take action to address global warming.

How can we manifest peace on earth if we do not include everyone (all races, all nations, all religions, both sexes) in our vision of Peace?

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