ARTS & FARCES internet

Well surprise, surprise. Not even two months into his administration, President George Bush The Younger has reversed one of his campaign positions, announcing that he would not seek to regulate power plants’ emissions of carbon dioxide, the gas most scientists recognize as a major contributor to global warming. During his campaign, Bush poked fun at Al Gore for his position of seeking voluntary compliance of the power plants with emissions standards.

Predictably, environmental groups, Democrats, and even some moderate Republicans called the move a betrayal. But Bush, a political animal to the last, didn’t even blink as he left his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, Christie Whitman, twisting in the wind. Whitman had already begun to implement Bush’s campaign promise as policy.

Bush, citing an Energy Department study that found that regulating carbon dioxide emissions would lead to “significantly higher electricity prices,” said that a re-evaluation of his campaign promise was warranted.

Sadly, that Bush broke a serious campaign promise should come as no surprise. Neither should it be surprising that he tried to justify his weasel-like moves under the (utterly false) guise of consumer protection: “At a time when California has already experienced energy shortages, and other Western states are worried about price and availability of energy this summer, we must be very careful not to take actions that could harm consumers.” Right. Having enough cheap air conditioning is clearly a higher priority than stopping the negative climate change clearly caused by the continued burning of fossil fuels.

Then Bush went further, playing us for fools when he said, “This is especially true given the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change and the lack of commercially available technologies for removing and storing carbon dioxide,” presumably with a straight face. Maybe it’s because gases rhymes with taxes and the shrub got confused. What he really meant to say during his campaign was “More carbon gases!”

Here are the facts. They’re simple enough for most grade-schoolers to understand:

• The average land surface temperature has risen about 1 degree F (0.6 degree C) in the last century (we accomplished about half of that in the last 25 years).
• Precipitation has increased about 1 percent worldwide in the last century, with high-latitude areas getting more precipitation and tropical areas getting less.
• Sea levels across the globe have risen about 7 inches in the last century.
• Carbon dioxide is released in the atmosphere when solid waste, fossil fuels, and wood are burned.
• Burning fossil fuels generates roughly 50% of electricity in the U.S.
• Every year, each U.S. citizen is responsible for about 6.6 tons of greenhouse gas emissions. In the last decade, these emissions increased by more than 3.5 percent. By comparison, each Swiss citizen is responsible for about 2 tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year.
• Oceans, trees, and soil absorb carbon dioxide.

When pressed that he caved to pressure from industry lobbyists, Bush responded by saying that he was “responding to realities and the reality is our nation has a real problem when it comes to energy.” Bush aides were quoted in the mainstream press as saying that they did not realize during the campaign that carbon dioxide was not a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. The question in this case, as in most cases of political backsliding is clear: “Were you lying then or are you lying now?”