World Climate Policy Reduced To Waiting For Bush To Leave Office

[hatrack]

June 8 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush succeeded in side-stepping mandatory greenhouse gas emission caps at this week's Group of Eight meeting. He didn't prevent other countries from laying the groundwork for carbon dioxide limits once he's gone, political observers and environmentalists say.

World leaders ``most definitely are looking beyond this administration to get any kind of hard cap on carbon,'' said Christine Todd Whitman, Bush's first administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The U.S., the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter, blocked an attempt to include in a G-8 agreement a pledge to cut global warming pollution in half by 2050, even as the European Union and Japan vowed to go ahead and start their own emissions reductions. Instead, the U.S. agreed it would ``consider seriously'' such measures and take part in international talks to craft a new treaty on climate change by 2009, the year Bush leaves office

EDIT

U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush's closest European ally who has tried to get the president to change his stance on mandatory caps, said last week that Bush's proposal was a ``huge step forward'' for the U.S. Whitman and others agree, though she added that Bush's action was long overdue. ``I'm glad to see this kind of movement,'' Whitman said in an interview yesterday. ``I just wish he had done it in 2001.'' (Ed. - emphasis added)

EDIT/END

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aUwJz8lsLSf4&refer=home

Well, isn't that just SWEET. Christie wishes he'd stopped pissing in the world's face six years ago. Funny, though, you didn't complain when he pissed in your face, voluminiously and repeatedly, now DID you?

[OneBlueSky]

1. could be a VERY long wait if/when Bush decides to enact his recent decree . . .

that gives him totalitarian powers -- probably for life . . .