Planetary Ruin

The White House on Tuesday denied it was planning a U-turn on its climate change policy by embracing a system of formal caps on greenhouse emissions, despite rising pressure from European governments to change its stance.

Although energy security will be a key theme in President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address next week, the White House issued an unusually public rebuttal of rumours about its climate change policy. Tony Snow, White House spokesman, said: “I want to walk you back from the whole carbon cap story…The carbon cap stuff is not accurate. It’s wrong.”

International pressure for Mr Bush to consider reducing US emissions via a form of “cap and trade” system like that in force in the European Union has intensified. The issue has been raised in the last two weeks by Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and José Manuel Barroso, European Commission president. Tony Blair, the British premier, has also been persistent in lobbying the president.

The Bush administration has consistently stressed technological solutions, rather than formal treaties such as the Kyoto accord. Mr Snow said: “What the president has talked about all along is the importance of innovation,” adding there was a need to focus on change “consistent with economic growth”.

After meeting Ms Merkel, Mr Bush said he would focus on “technological developments that will enable us to be good stewards of the environment, and enable us to become less dependent on oil and hydrocarbons from parts of the world that may not like us”.

The president is also under pressure at home. Last Friday six US senators – including two presidential hopefuls for 2008, the Republican John McCain and the Democrat Barack Obama – presented a cap and trade proposal to force industries, such as electricity utilities, to cut by 2050 greenhouse gas emissions to one third of the levels of 2000.

White House officials remain privately sceptical about a British report produced in October by Sir Nicholas Stern on the economics of climate change, suggesting it would be wrong to make big decisions based on what some officials dismiss as “popular science”. Mr Stern is due to testify next month before a Senate committee that will address emissions legislation.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 3:37 pm and is filed under Global Warming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.