Nancy Pelosi Begins Global Warming Tour
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on an overseas trip to embrace an audience and a topic for which President Bush has shown scant affection: “Old Europe” and global warming.
Pelosi, D-Calif., and seven other House members left Saturday for meetings with scientists and politicians in Greenland, Germany and Belgium on ways to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
The trip comes shortly before a climate change summit next month involving the leading industrialized nations and during a time of increased debate over what should succeed the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 international treaty that caps the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted from power plants and factories in industrialized countries. It expires in 2012.
Bush rejected that accord, saying it would harm the U.S. economy and unfair excludes developing countries like China and India from its obligations. Pelosi, who strongly disagrees with that decision and many other of Bush’s environmental policies, told The Associated Press on Friday that she said she wants to work with the administration rather than provoke it.
But Pelosi stopped short of condemning the president’s call for slowing the nation’s growth rate in carbon emissions, an approach that many say is too meek.
“I think there are better ideas,” Pelosi said. “I want to keep the door completely open to working with the president on the issue of energy independence and global warming. … There are plenty of areas where we can find common ground.”