Further evidence that the voluntary Bush program is not doing much of anything can be found in how few companies participate in its much ballyhooed Climate Leaders program. Fifty-six companies got involved, with fewer than half of those agreeing to set targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. "The bottom line is, in the absence of a mandatory program you're not going to have the kind of participation you need," says Vicki Arroyo, director of policy analysis for the PEW Center on Global Climate Change.

After all, why should companies participate if they don't have to? "With this voluntary framework, it just creates so little incentive for people to do anything, even if you have a good program in place to help them do the right thing," says Christensen.

And then there's Bush's Climate VISION program, which allows industry sectors to set their own voluntary emissions intensity reduction targets. Not surprisingly, the industry associations set very modest goals for themselves. For instance, the electric power industry pledged to reduce carbon intensity by 3 to 5 percent within the decade, while complaining that this would be "very difficult" to accomplish.

With his ideological opposition to forcing industry to do anything, Bush has focused on funding research initiatives into new technologies that could help CO2-intensive industries emit less carbon in the future -- the far future. For instance, he's trumpeting his investment in a demonstration power plant, which would capture and sequester the CO2 emissions under the ground. But concerns about catastrophic CO2 leaks and possible aquifer contamination have left some unconvinced. "Certainly, the verdict is not in on coal sequestration, and until it is, we're highly skeptical of that," says Dave Hamilton, director of global warming and energy programs for the Sierra Club. Gelbspan is more direct. "Carbon sequestration is a huge misuse of money that could be put into renewable energy," he says. "This would be a boondoggle for Halliburton and Bechtel. If you simply use that money to put up wind farms, you'd be doing the right thing."

Some environmental groups favor government investment in research to try to make carbon sequestration work -- but not without corresponding mandatory limits on C02 emissions. "We're not going to support them in a separate fashion because that's a way to get swindled," says David G. Hawkins, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's climate center. So even if carbon sequestration does show promise, subsidizing its research and development without also forcing the coal industry to emit less C02 amounts to a giveaway to a polluting industry.

Bush has adopted the same new-technology-is-our-savior approach with the auto industry, funding research into hydrogen fuel-cell cars, while only marginally raising the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards that regulate how many miles per gallon cars on the road must get. He's hyped the promise of hydrogen fuel-cell cars, which would emit nothing but water from the tailpipe.

But despite his campaign's claim that such cars would "emit no air pollutants or greenhouse gases," using hydrogen could actually end up creating a lot of CO2 emissions, according to Joseph Romm, the author of "The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate," who was in charge of clean energy in the Department of Energy in the Clinton administration. That's because the hydrogen has to be derived from somewhere and today 95 percent of hydrogen in the U.S. comes from natural gas -- a fossil fuel. And since hydrogen is such a diffuse gas it would take a lot of energy to compress or deliver it. Even those who continue to be more optimistic about getting hydrogen from renewable sources in the future don't see them on the road in large numbers for decades.

While Bush bets on new technologies saving us from global warming, the atmosphere continues to heat up. "Climate scientists are divided on whether or not there is global warming the same way that Americans are divided about whether or not Ralph Nader should be president," says Eban Goodstein, an economics professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., who is founder of the Green House Network, a nonprofit working to stop global warming. Which is to say, they're not divided at all. "And without presidential leadership and given the hold that anti-government Republicans have, especially in the House, nothing will happen."

With the topic largely off the table in the presidential reelection bid, the nation loses not only more time, but an important chance for the president to educate the public about the biggest environmental threat to the country today.

"Global climate change is going to require a global solution," says Nigel Purvis, an environmental scholar at the Brookings Institution. "The president is a very important player on the issue of climate change. The power of the office to educate the American people does matter." But apparently not in the office of this president.

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