Is Bush warming to action on climate change?

The New York Times' timeline illustrating how the Bush administration's position on climate change has evolved since early 2001 has its most recent entry yesterday. It reads "Mr. Bush agrees for the first time to set ‘a long-term global goal’ for curbing emissions of greenhouse gases.“ “[H]e called on other high-polluting nations to join the United States in negotiations aimed at reaching an agreement by the end of next year” (source).

Does this represent a significant change in Administration policy? Well, if it does then NASA Administrator Michael Griffin didn't get the memo. Griffin says that “although global warming is changing Earth's climate, he's not convinced that [it] is ‘a problem we must wrestle with’” (source).

The Economist argues that “The new American initiative seems an admission that its previous strategy has failed” (source). Indeed, it's hard to take this new initiative seriously when the Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality and the President's top environmental adviser, James Connaughton, said that the long-term goals the President is proposing “are ‘aspirational.’ They would not be binding unless individual nations chose to bind themselves’” (source)¹.

The Economist concludes with these observations:

All these proposals [proposals from Australia, Britain, Canada, and Germany] are much more ambitious than America's, and it will take a lengthy debate – and perhaps another president – to reconcile them. In the meantime, global emissions continue to grow. Indeed, the growth appears to be accelerating. A study recently published by America’s National Academy of Sciences found that worldwide emissions, which had been growing by 1.1% a year in the 1990s, grew by more than 3% a year between 2000 and 2004. That is faster than the most pessimistic projections of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body set up to make authoritative pronouncements on the science of global warming. It is also faster than economic growth, implying that the world is not just consuming more energy, but also making it ever more dirtily.

---

¹The full text of the White House press briefing that includes Connaughton's comments is here. The White House fact sheet on the proposal is here. Would I be too cynical if I pointed out that the proposed new framework would take effect in 2012, four years after this President leaves office?