Earth Equity News

Posturing and Abdication. Editorial, NYTimes, July 13, 2008. "The Bush administration made clear on Friday that it will do virtually nothing to regulate the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. With no shame and no apology, it stuck a thumb in the eye of the Supreme Court, repudiated its own scientists and exposed the hollowness of Mr. Bush's claims to have seen the light on climate change. That is the import of an announcement by Stephen Johnson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, that the EPA will continue to delay a decision on whether global warming threatens human health and welfare and requires regulations to address it... The urgent problem of global warming demands urgent action. And the Supreme Court surely expected a speedier response when -- 15 months ago -- it ordered the EPA to determine whether greenhouse gas pollution from vehicles (and, by extension, other sources) endangers human welfare and, if so, to issue regulations to limit emissions... The agency sent its findings to the White House... [which] decided to ignore the findings... [and mount an effort] to ensure that the EPA's response to the Supreme Court's decision would be as weak as possible. This campaign of obfuscation and intimidation included doctoring Congressional testimony on the health effects of climate change; ordering the EPA to recompute its numbers to minimize the economic benefits of curbing carbon dioxide; and promoting the fiction that the modest fuel-economy improvements in last year's energy bill would solve the problem of carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles... Mr. Bush spent years denying there was a climate change problem. And while he no longer denies the science, he still insists on putting the concerns of industry over the needs of the planet."