Bush's Bait and Switch on Climate Change

President Bush is making headlines today thanks to his surprising mention of global climate change in his State of the Union address and his corresponding proposal to reduce gasoline consumption by 20% in 10 years. As the Washington Post put it,

The energy proposals President Bush outlined last night break new ground for his administration. He combined a call to lower gasoline consumption with new mandates for oil companies and new standards for automakers. And he couched these in the context of enhancing U.S. energy security and addressing climate change.

In a way, though, his conflation of reducing gas consumption and addressing global warming was reminiscent of past speeches in which he mentioned 9/11 and Iraq in the same breath, without actually saying that one was directly related to the other. Of course, burning gas is one of the primary causes of global warming, but by proposing to cut gas consumption by 20%, it seems the president is hoping to gain political points on the global warming issue, without actually doing anything to seriously address its causes.

When it comes to climate change, the real issue is carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and greenhouse gases. These gases are produced by a variety of activities, by burning coal for instance. And as the Post points out, when it comes to Bush's proposal, “Administration officials said that the goal is 20 percent below projected annual gasoline usage, not off today’s levels,” meaning “that carbon dioxide emissions from transportation fuels will drop only slightly from today’s levels; other parts of the economy produce the other two-thirds of greenhouse gases.”

Essentially, Bush's proposal will do next to nothing to address the causes of climate change, and will certainly do nothing to reverse its effects.

Also, as the LA Times points out, "some aspects of the overall plan seemed to contradict each other."

For one, Bush's proposal to save gasoline by increasing vehicle fuel economy standards could be undermined by his call for greater use of alternative fuels. Ethanol, for example, gets less mileage than gasoline and, without a major technological breakthrough, requiring more of it could make it harder to increase fuel efficiency.

Philip E. Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, said that the president's request for new legislation "letting him set standards basically model-by-model is something Detroit has pushed for years — as a way to poke more loopholes in the current weak standards."

One irony of Bush's proposal is that it seems to be utterly arbitrary, and one of the main arguments the administration has made against the Kyoto Protocol on global warming has been that its CO2 reduction targets are arbitrary and could adversely affect the U.S. economy. Considering the improbability of the 20% reduction in achieving any results on climate change, the question must be asked what the point of it is in the first place.

For its part, the Sierra Club is urging Americans to use the opportunity provided by Bush's speech to seriously press the administration to take real action on climate change. In an open letter to the president, the organization says,

We want action -- we want to break our nation's oil habit, invest in renewable wind and solar power, and adopt plans that use clean energy technologies to create jobs. We want action taken on global warming.

President Bush, you have a choice -- you can spend the last two years of your Presidency footdragging, continuing to block real action on global warming or you can work with the new Congress to do what the American people want and that's to take steps to solve global warming.

To add your name to the letter, click here.