WP: Climate Talks Bring Bush's Policy to Fore (claims technology is answer

[kskiska]

In the four years since President Bush took office, scientific sleuths trying to understand the extent of global climate change -- and finger the culprits -- have come up with several important new clues:

• Glaciers in the Antarctic and in Greenland are melting much faster than expected, and the fastest moving glacier in the world has doubled its speed.

• Worldwide, plants are blooming several days earlier than they did a decade ago, and animals are migrating toward cooler climates across the globe.

• The oceans have absorbed extra heat trapped in the atmosphere, which indicates Earth's temperature should rise by another degree Fahrenheit in the coming decades.

The president's scientific and policy advisers on global warming do not dispute these findings, but none of them has persuaded the White House to alter its current climate policy. Rather than endorsing mandatory limits on carbon dioxide emissions linked to warming, the course embraced by most of America's allies, the White House is focusing on technological fixes: developing energy sources that burn cleaner or finding ways to extract excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35915-2004Dec4.html

[TahitiNut]

1. Carats for the corporations; sticks for the people.

:eyes: Mines and shafts, profits and costs, fair and balanced -- from each according to their abilities; to each according to their greeds.
:puke:

[Occulus]

2. cleaner fuel sources would be nice

but what exactly would the point of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere be? What would we do with it?

I hear the world's first commercial fusion reactor is set to be built soon: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4044895.stm

The last paragraph is most interesting:

"The fusion fuels are plentiful and produce no greenhouse emissions when "burnt". The systems are said to be inherently safe because they shutdown in a malfunction; and although radioactive materials are produced, they are not of the high-level long-lived variety that has so burdened nuclear fission."

So why doesn't the US have one in the works? Our scientists aren't exactly idiots. Build one out in the desert and prove the technology.

If * got behind this, I think it would mark the very first time I would ever have supported something he did.

Not that that will ever happen.

[aneerkoinos]

4. Why would

bunch of representatives of oil (and military) industry do anything to undermine their power?

It's not commercial yet, only experimentary. If everything goes really really well, commercial fusion power available in about 20 years.

It will be build in Europe, even though US and Japan want it to be built in Japan, because EU wants it France, simple as that. Not only because Europe (see e.g. CERN) and especially France (loads of fission power) has currently the best technological edge in civilian research of nuclear physics, but because of OECD block EU is the number one in enviromentalism, in global conscience and in futuristic cutting edge enviroment friendly technology plus... the biggest economy on Earth.

[rodeodance]

6. but the fossil fuel industry already wrote the bill (that did not yet pass

[cal04]

3. Bush sets out plan to dismantle 30 years of environmental laws

George Bush's new administration, and its supporters controlling Congress, are setting out to dismantle three decades of US environmental protection.

In little over a month since his re-election, they have announced that they will comprehensively rewrite three of the country's most important environmental laws, open up vast new areas for oil and gas drilling, and reshape the official Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

They say that the election gave them a mandate for the measures - which, ironically, will overturn a legislative system originally established by the Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford - even though Mr Bush went out of his way to avoid emphasising his environmental plans during his campaign.

"The election was a validation of the philosophy and the agenda," said Mike Leavitt, the Bush-appointed head of the EPA. He points out that over a third of the agency's staff will become eligible for retirement over the President's four-year term, enabling him to fill it with people lenient to polluters.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=589884

[DeepModem Mom]

5. Page-one story -- kick