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2 Bush's annual hot air
emission By Michael Piskur
In his sixth State of the Union address,
US President George W Bush renewed his call to
increase his country's energy independence and
acknowledged "the serious challenge of global
climate change", a topic that his administration
has largely ignored since taking power in 2001.
With two years remaining in a presidential
term that will be defined by the grim realities of
the conflict in Iraq, Bush used his annual address
to Congress as an attempt to salvage a domestic
agenda.
No longer aided by a Republican-controlled
Congress, Bush finds himself facing a Democratic
Party that has vowed to move forward on domestic
issues.
Anticipation of a bold plan to
reduce US reliance on foreign energy and combat
global warming mounted in the days leading up to
the president's address, since Congress pledged to
tackle global warming and a group of chief
executive officers from major US companies pressed
Bush to address environmental degradation. Bush
called for a 20% reduction in US gasoline
consumption in 10 years, the doubling of the
capacity of the strategic petroleum reserve, and
increased research on clean energy sources such as
clean coal, solar and wind energy, nuclear power,
bio-diesel and ethanol.
He failed,
however, to endorse mandatory limits on carbon
emissions, instead seeking a market-based solution
centered on technological progress.
"The
president has always believed when it comes to
climate change that the best way to achieve
reductions is through innovation and to figure out
ways to come up with energy sources that are going
to meet our economy's constant demand for energy
and at the same time do it in a way that's going
to be friendly for the environment," said White
House Press Secretary Tony Snow.
Washington considers global warming Bush, in explaining his 2001 decision not to
ratify the Kyoto Protocol, said: "America's
unwillingness to embrace a flawed treaty should
not be read by our friends and allies as any
abdication of responsibility. To the contrary, my
administration is committed to a leadership role
on the issue of climate change."
The Bush
administration, however, has largely failed to
live up to these promises. The United States
consumes about one-quarter of world energy
supplies and produces the same amount of carbon
emissions, and yearly emissions have steadily
increased since 2001.
While acknowledging
that the planet is getting warmer, the White House
has yet to take any action to limit pollution or
energy consumption; it has played down and
censored scientific studies that attribute global
warming to human activity; and it continues to
maintain that ratifying Kyoto would have
disastrous results for the US economy. Bush is
also highly critical of Kyoto's exemption for the
rapidly expanding economies of China and India.
Yet as Washington ignored global warming,
many US cities have committed themselves to
adhering to the framework established by Kyoto, a
growing number of states have begun to pass
legislation that closely mirrors Kyoto, and the
Chicago Climate Exchange was established as the
first voluntary, legally binding cap-and-trade
system for greenhouse gases.
California,
the world's eighth-largest economy by gross
domestic product and 12th-largest producer of
greenhouse gases, passed the Global Warming
Solutions Act, which established mandatory
statewide caps on carbon emissions, and the Low
Carbon Fuel Standard, which seeks to increase the
use of renewable energy sources for
transportation. California Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger endorses a 25% cut in carbon output
by 2020 that would follow a cap-and-trade system.
Since assuming control of Congress last
month, the Democratic House of Representatives
majority repealed a tax break for oil and gas
firms that would provide about $14 billion to fund
renewable energy research, and House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi created the Select Committee on Energy
Independence and Global Warming to hold hearings
and recommend approaches to mitigate the effects
of global warming. "The science of global warming
and its impact is overwhelming and unequivocal. We
want to work with President Bush on this important
issue in a bipartisan way. But we cannot afford to
wait."
Bush's proposal for an increase in
production to 35 billion US gallons (132.5 billion
liters) of "renewable and alternative fuels" by
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