Earth Equity News, April 20, 2007

Too Little, Too Late from the Bush White House. By Jim Lobe, IPS, April 17, 2008. "Seven years after rejecting [Kyoto], President Bush Wednesday called for halting the growth in U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025, a goal greeted with derision by Democrats and environmental groups. Speaking from the... Rose Garden, Bush suggested most of the effort to reduce emissions should be focused on the power industry, which currently accounts for about 40% of all U.S. emissions, and that the key to success lay with improvements in technology rather than taxes or… mandatory limits... 'The wrong way is to raise taxes, duplicate mandates, or demand sudden and drastic emissions cuts that have no chance of being realized and every chance of hurting our economy,' Bush said. But environmental activists dismissed [his] remarks as both too little and too late and warned that they appeared to be designed more to head off pending legislation... opposed by his corporate backers. 'The idea that President Bush is serious about fighting global warming is laughable,' said Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth here... 'This is the last whimper from an increasingly irrelevant president.'"