Bush climate goals don’t impress

President Bush announced a new goal of halting greenhouse gas emissions growth by 2025 in a Rose Garden address that fell short of the hopes of environmentalists but was greeted with relief by global warming skeptics in Congress and energy lobbyists on K Street.

“This proposal is too little, too late to effectively reverse global warming and too little, too late to save this president’s record of failure,” said Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters, in response.

{mosads}Clean Air Watch’s Frank O’Donnell called the principles Bush laid out in his speech “almost laughable.”

“The president is about eight years behind the curve,” O’Donnell said.

Fred Krupp of Environmental Defense was more charitable:  “The administration is now inching closer to the table, and that can help move a bill in 2008. What remains to be seen is whether the president is willing to support legislation that gets the job done.”

Bush’s address, given on the same day Pope Benedict XVI arrived in Washington, laid out broad principles for a global warming bill.

It avoided key questions like whether a cap-and-trade system is preferable to a carbon tax; if federal pre-emption would block state efforts to cut emissions; or whether a bill should include a “safety valve” that would suspend emissions goals if the costs to industry rose too high.

Offering few specifics, Bush said a climate bill should encourage the development of new technologies that will be needed to stop emissions growth. It should create a “carbon-weighted” incentive “to make lower-emission power sources less expensive relative to higher-emissions sources,” the president said.

And the United States should not move forward without an international agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, Bush said.

The president’s speech came a day before representatives from the 17 largest economies, and therefore the 17 largest emitters of greenhouse gases, meet in Paris to continue to discuss a regime for curbing emissions.

Domestically, Bush said a global warming bill was necessary because existing environmental laws like the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act are not appropriate vehicles to regulate carbon emissions. But courts could apply them to the problem of climate change and, by doing so, create significant economic harm, Bush said.

If environmentalists were disappointed in the speech, energy lobbyists and Hill global warming skeptics breathed a sigh of relief the White House hasn’t joined in the growing call for steep emissions reductions.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), perhaps the Senate’s leading voice opposing carbon caps, said his “major concern” was that the president would embrace a cap-and-trade bill, which he did not.

“I don’t agree with [Bush’s goal], but I think that’s a fairly moderate position to take,” Inhofe said.

House Republicans, too, feared the worst after reading in The Washington Times on Monday that the administration was prepared to support a global warming bill. Up to now, the administration has favored an approach that set targets for reductions in the intensity of greenhouse gas emissions — a metric that measures emissions against economic growth — that the industry would be asked, not required, to meet.

The Times article followed a briefing last Wednesday hastily put together at the White House’s request. During the meeting, James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, noted the limitation of current environmental laws to deal with the climate change issue, but stopped short of embracing a specific strategy to curb emissions, energy lobbyists close to the conference said.  

The subsequent article then prompted worried calls from Republican members and senior aides to the White House urging the president not to embrace steep reduction targets, and to tie congressional climate efforts to some future international climate change agreement.

Democrats, meanwhile, joined environmentalists in criticizing the president’s speech. Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), for example, called it a “drought of vision and leadership.”

But others welcomed what they said was a shift in the administration’s policy, however small.

“The significance is that the issue is no longer if we do it but how we are going to do it,” said John Cahill, an energy and environmental lawyer at Chadbourne & Parke. “A lot of questions remain unanswered, but at least it was a recognition that the federal government plays a role.”

Manu Raju contributed to this report.