"Governor Bush will work to develop legislation that will establish mandatory reduction targets for emissions of carbon dioxide."
In March of 2001, he wrote key senators, "I do not believe that the government should impose on power plants mandatory emissions reductions for carbon dioxide, which is not a ‘pollutant’ under the Clean Air Act." His promise to reduce carbon emissions lasted a little over a half a year before he did a complete 180 and opposed mandatory reductions.
After lying about his commitment to addressing global climate change, Bush set about denying that global warming was even a problem. In April of 2004, Bush -- up for re-election -- needed to hide his lousy environmental record. The Observer obtained an email to Republican Congressmen advising them on how to lie about climate change.
The memo - headed 'From medi-scare to air-scare' - goes on: 'From the heated debate on global warming to the hot air on forests; from the muddled talk on our nation's waters to the convolution on air pollution, we are fighting a battle of fact against fiction on the environment - Republicans can't stress enough that extremists are screaming "Doomsday!" when the environment is actually seeing a new and better day.'
Among the memo's assertions are 'global warming is not a fact', 'links between air quality and asthma in children remain cloudy', and the US Environment Protection Agency is exaggerating when it says that at least 40 per cent of streams, rivers and lakes are too polluted for drinking, fishing or swimming.
It gives a list of alleged facts taken from contentious sources. For instance, to back its claim that air quality is improving it cites a report from Pacific Research Institute - an organization that has received $130,000 from Exxon Mobil since 1998.
The memo also lifts details from the controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg. On the Republicans' claims that deforestation is not a problem, it states: 'About a third of the world is still covered with forests, a level not changed much since World War II. The world's demand for paper can be permanently satisfied by the growth of trees in just five per cent of the world's forests.'
The memo's main source for the denial of global warming is Richard Lindzen, a climate-skeptic scientist who has consistently taken money from the fossil fuel industry. His opinion differs substantially from most climate scientists, who say that climate change is happening.
This is the Republican mindset -- if the public perception is that there's no problem, there's no problem. There's nothing on Earth that a good PR campaign can't fix. They seemed trapped in the moment, unable to see that a future exists. As much as the neocons pride themselves on being pro-active, they're pretty much just reactionaries. They do no long-range planning -- the occupation of Iraq being a case in point...
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Tags: news politics environment global warming science EPA Bush republican propaganda
