As anticipated, Bush’s climate change pact (leaked yesterday by Australia) is smoke and mirrors:
Environmentalists Thursday condemned a new pact against global warming agreed by the United States and five Asia-Pacific countries, saying it was self-serving and would not work…
“No doubt the (Australian) government has been cooking this scheme up for a while to cover up for their failure to ratify Kyoto, and to try to prove that developing countries are abandoning Kyoto,” said [Greenpeace Australia] spokeswoman Catherine Fitzpatrick…
…”The suggested scheme is, unlike Kyoto, a voluntary scheme and all evidence shows that voluntary schemes do not work.”
“Although detail on the ‘secret plan’ is difficult to access, it appears to contain no binding commitments,” [Friends of the Earth Australia] spokesman Cam Walker told AFP…
The leader of the opposition Australian Greens party, Bob Brown, dismissed the new agreement as “a coal pact” involving four of the world’s biggest coal producers — China, the US, India and Australia.
It was designed to “defend the coal industry in an age where it’s the biggest industry contributing deliberately to the global warming threat to Australia and the planet,” he said.
In Geneva, the environmental group WWF said: “A deal on climate change that doesn’t limit pollution is the same as a peace plan that allows guns to be fired.”
…Calling it a “Machiavellian pact”, executive director Clive Hamilton [of The Australia Institute, an environmental think-tank] said “the main beneficiaries will be Australian coal companies, some of the world’s biggest greenhouse polluters.
Only limited information continues to be available, not only because of the administration’s compulsion to secrecy, but also because it appears that the pact is a classic example of “Where’s the beef?”
WASHINGTON — The United States and five Asian and Pacific nations, including China and India, agreed Wednesday on a partnership to use cleaner energy technologies in hopes of curtailing climate-changing pollution.
The agreement does not bind any country — Japan, Australia and South Korea are the others — to specific emission reductions. It also is not viewed as a replacement for the Kyoto climate pact, which several of the participants — though not the U.S. — have embraced.
White House officials see the partnership as an important step in setting up a system to help emerging industrial countries produce cleaner energy and slow the growth of climate-changing emissions, especially carbon from fossil fuels.
President Bush called it a “results-oriented partnership.” It will speed the development and use of cleaner and more efficient ways “to meet national pollution reduction, energy security and climate change concerns,” Bush said in a statement.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman will meet this fall with their counterparts in the partnership to move the effort forward.
Just what we need: not targets, goals or deadlines, OH NO! We need “partnerships” towards “step[s] in setting up a system.” And how are we to measure the results of this “results-oriented partnership,” pray tell Mr. Bush, without TARGETS, GOALS or DEADLINES?
Meanwhile, the following items on climate change were culled from today’s headlines only:
· A record low level for June Arctic sea ice was measured this year.
· The Amazon may not be nearly as good at removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as we had thought (hoped). Two words: Uh Oh.
· Congress nears approval of an energy plan that does precious little to address our energy needs or climate change (surprise, surprise). From the Christian Science Monitor:
Like most heavily compromised legislation, the comprehensive energy bill agreed to this week by the House and Senate and headed for a presidential signature is as notable for what it doesn’t do as for what it accomplishes.
It does not include oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). [Well, at least we dodged that bullet – DinK] It declines to increase auto efficiency standards to conserve gasoline and decrease pollution. It won’t bail out the makers of a controversial fuel additive targeted in more than 150 lawsuits. It doesn’t make much of a dent in the greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming.
Nor – in the short term, at least – does it do anything to spare American consumers the financial pinch of soaring oil prices, or their dependence on foreign oil, now approaching 60 percent.
But the first major energy bill since 1992 does do enough to qualify as political progress, not least of all because it manages to avoid the twin threats of congressional filibuster or presidential veto. And coming as it does when war is being fought in an oil-rich part of the world, and when it nearly takes a second mortgage to fill up the family car, the package shows that Washington is doing something on energy.
…Others see the bill, expected to be signed before the president’s Aug. 1 deadline, quite differently.
“Both Republicans and Democrats are completely paralyzed in addressing the nation’s three big energy challenges – reducing our dependence on Middle East oil, reducing gasoline prices for consumers, and beginning to shift our economy to renewable energy technologies,” says Philip Clapp, president of the National Environment Trust. “On all three issues, the bill is a big fat zero.”
Environmentalists also warn that it chips away at the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act by giving energy companies exemptions during construction.
· EPA holds back report on auto efficiency, not wanting to make the energy bill look bad. But a copy got out before the embargo hit (ooops!). From the NY Times:
With Congress poised for a final vote on the energy bill, the Environmental Protection Agency made an 11th-hour decision Tuesday to delay the planned release of an annual report on fuel economy.
But a copy of the report, embargoed for publication Wednesday, was sent to The New York Times by a member of the E.P.A. communications staff just minutes before the decision was made to delay it until next week. The contents of the report show that loopholes in American fuel economy regulations have allowed automakers to produce cars and trucks that are significantly less fuel-efficient, on average, than they were in the late 1980’s. [Another leak! I love it! Another paper cut for Karl – DinK]
Releasing the report this week would have been inopportune for the Bush administration, its critics said, because it would have come on the eve of a final vote in Congress on energy legislation six years in the making. The bill, as it stands, largely ignores auto mileage regulations.
· The latest National Geographic (on news stands now) has a cover story on global warming. It’s a good overview of some recent studies of concern, and you can get it on line here.
And there’s nothing special about today; this kind of information is coming out on a daily basis. Some days I truly feel that we are going to be the frog in the pot slowly brought to a boil – the one who could have jumped out at any point, but didn’t notice anything was amiss until it was too late, and was cooked:
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise. – Aldo Leopold
I struggle daily with how much of this kind of news to burden my wife and children with.
