April 16th, 2008

Bush Speech on Climate Change: Progress?

Posted by Jessica Jensen

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President Bush delivered an address today on climate change. The good news is that he seems to be in a bigger hurry than before to address the problem. The bad news is that he was short on specifics for how his goals should be achieved.

Here’s his big statement: “Today, I am announcing a new national goal: to stop the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2025.”

Now the fact that we’ll be belching out more carbon than you can shake a stick at until then wasn’t apparently a concern for the President.

He also stated, “To reach our 2025 goal, we will need to more rapidly slow the growth of power sector greenhouse gas emissions so that they peak within 10 to 15 years and decline thereafter. By doing so, we will reduce emission levels in the power sector well below where they were projected to be when we first announced our climate strategy in 2002. There are a number of ways to achieve these reductions, but all responsible approaches depend on accelerating the development and deployment of new technologies.”

What are those approaches? What are the new technologies? Not much was offered on that front– but he did encourage us to not give up on nuclear power or coal: “The right way is to promote more emission-free nuclear power and encourage the investments necessary to produce electricity from coal without releasing carbon into the air.” 

Read some reactions to the speech from our friends at Grist.org.  “Same as it ever was,” pretty much sums it up.

What did you think?

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