Kind of a good news, bad news story:
President George W. Bush has invited the European Union, the United Nations and 11 other countries to the September 27-28 meeting in Washington to work toward setting a long-term goal by 2008 to cut emissions.
Yet it turns out just to be a meeting full of sound and fury, signifying nothing: "But a senior U.S. official said the administration stood by its opposition to mandatory economy-wide caps."
A meeting aimed at (1) developing voluntary or aspirational targets, (2) for the long-term, (3) by 2008 [i.e. Bush's last year in office]. Three strikes and you are out.
Bush's last chance to be a small part of the solution rather than a large part of the problem came and went at the G-8 meeting, where Bush nixed an effort to set realistic and binding long-term targets.
The only interesting question that will be answered by this meeting is whether the media will be suckered into giving the President the one outcome he truly wants -- positive press coverage on climate change, an area of such catastrophic failure by this administration that it will probably ensure (even more than Iraq) that history judges Bush a failure.
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Comments
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Billhook Posted 11:40 pm
03 Aug 2007
was sheer denialist circus -
for that target was not remotely "realistic" as you suggest.
In fact it was merely a random pair of numbers, chosen for their roundness,
in total denial of scientific advice.
Their adoption would have generated a CO2 concentration of way over 550ppmv,
effectively garanteeing the feedback loops running the climate into a catastrophic instability.
For the record, back in 1990, the IPCC advised that just to stop adding to the problem of excess airborne GHGs
we will need to cut our global output of them by 60% to 80%.
Until the day we have done so, we will continue to worsen the problem.
So, apart from the photo-ops, what would be the point of agreeing a nonsense target,
for more than four decades hence,
with an utterly corrupt American regime ?
Regards,
Bill
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Delay And Deny Posted 4:08 am
04 Aug 2007
These cuts are reachable in a voluntary fashion by 2050.
France has already cut its GHGs by going 80 nuclear.
The Chevy Volt can get 150 mpg.
And those are just the begining.
Boeing announced a 40% efficient solar cell.
New hydrogen storage technologies have been patented at an exponential rate in the past 3 years.
John Bailo
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