Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Pressure here and abroad may leave him no choice.
Jul 18, 2001 | Here's a prediction: Sometime in the next year, no matter how much it may run counter to his oilman's contempt for environmentalists, President Bush will change course and join the international effort to combat global warming. The stakes have become too high for Bush to continue to burn political capital so recklessly. His most likely approach will be to accept a watered-down version of the Kyoto Protocol he famously and hastily rejected earlier this year.
It didn't have to be this way for Bush. His many bewildering missteps and political miscalculations on environmental policy have already pointlessly eroded an already shaky public confidence. The same New York Times/CBS News poll that found Bush's job approval rating dipping to 53 percent late last month found that two-thirds of those polled, including a plurality of Republicans, believe that both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are "too beholden to oil companies." But that was just the start of the bad news for the administration: Only 39 percent of those polled approved of Bush's handling of the environment; more than half favored ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, which would impose targets on industrialized nations to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, even if nonindustrialized nations like China and India get off easy; and 72 percent believed immediate steps were necessary to fight global warming, rather than pausing for more study.
It may be hard for Bush and his oil-industry friends to accept that environmental politics really matter, but they do. And in the end public opinion will force Bush into a full-scale repositioning in order to save himself from falling permanently out of step with the majority of the American people on the issue of global warming. What the Times/CBS News and other polls show is that the American people do care about global warming, and they see through the smoke-and-mirrors tactics the Bush administration has had the gall to package as an environmental policy.
As representatives of 175 nations were preparing to gather this week and next in Bonn, Germany, for yet another round of bruising, largely futile negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol, the Bush administration was busy making its own attempts to appear serious about the issue. On Friday, Bush announced several initiatives aimed at countering global warming in Washington. One of Bush's main proposals is a $14 million program to work with the government of El Salvador on forest preservation. And people claim Bush doesn't take global warming seriously!
OK, the administration also announced more money for more studies, including one NASA would conduct using advanced climate modeling. But the point is this: Both the American public and the world community agree that no matter what the details, global warming clearly is a problem -- one that deserves immediate action and not dithering, even if much of the doom-and-gloom scaremongering on the issue is misplaced.
The chasm between Bush and his advisors and what the public and world leaders think about global warming has been apparent since March, when the administration first announced its outright rejection of the treaty. Some have argued that Bush deserves credit for his honesty in coming right out and staking out his true position (as opposed to his misleading campaign rhetoric about reducing carbon-dioxide emissions). But the administration has repeatedly shot itself in the foot over Kyoto.
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