Bush: ‘We’re Doing A Lot To Protect This Environment’

<p>President Bush announced a national goal to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 in his speech today on global climate change. Many have greeted this new strategy with rolling eyes, saying that the White House is all talk and no action. <br id="nq9i" />

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In today’s speech, the president said we’re well on our way to meeting his 2002 goal of reducing emissions by 18 percent by the year 2012 — &quot;even as the economy has grown by 17 percent,&quot; Bush said. But environmentalists took that plan with a grain of salt too, since the target reduction was for emissions <a id="gyp-" href="http://www.pewclimate.org/policy_center/analyses/response_bushpolicy.cfm" title="intensity" style="font-style: italic;">intensity</a>; actual emissions would be allowed to increase. In other words, greenhouse gas emissions will have grown steadily by 2012.<br id="dup2" />

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Today Bush said that his new strategy includes working with Congress to pass energy legislation with the goal of curbing global warming. He didn’t give specifics for what the legislation should look like, but he did say the U.S. needs to embrace nuclear power and clean coal technologies. In discussing coal, he mentioned the need for carbon capture and storage. But the Bush administration hasn’t exactly put federal money where its mouth is on carbon-capture-and-storage technology. It recently <a id="sxjm" href="http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/1/31/12135/8746" title="turned its back">turned its back</a> on the clean coal project it once loudly supported, FutureGen, because it was getting too expensive. <br id="i7s3" />

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It’s interesting that Bush talked so much about the need for new technologies, given his administration’s lack of investment in green technology. Climate Progress has a good <a id="uhis" href="http://climateprogress.org/2008/04/16/bushnero-climate-speech-technology-technology-blah-blah-lets-fiddle-until-2025/" title="post">post</a> following the &quot;8-repetitions-of-technology-speech,&quot; as they call it.<br id="jadu" />

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Today’s speech could give people hope that Bush has joined the effort to stop global warming. But environmentalists will say don’t get too excited, based on his less-than-green <a id="x4-m" href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3861238" title="record">record</a>. </p>