Six Former EPA Heads Urge Climate Action - And Bush Could Not Care Less

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Twenty-nine leading U.S. economists, including three Nobel laureates, have proposed a market-based cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases. Scientists, senators, governors, mayors, industry leaders and many others around the world all are pushing serious steps to slow climate change. But not the White House. It still acts as though climate change is some distant, theoretical problem, one it can brush off with a token, voluntary program to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. That's not enough, and every living person who has served as EPA administrator, except two who still work for this president, knows it.

At an event Wednesday to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the EPA, the former administrators ripped the White House for its failure to address to climate change. "This is a major disaster for the world," said Russell Train, who directed the agency under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford from 1973 to 1977. "We need leadership, and I don't think we're getting it. To sit back and just push it away and say we'll deal with it sometime down the road is dishonest . . . and self-destructive."

Yet that is the policy of this administration. The White House clings to the idea of a voluntary plan to cut emissions "intensity," a measure of total emissions as a fraction of economic output. But even if the president's wishful thinking about voluntary compliance comes true, it would barely change emissions in the United States, which is responsible for nearly a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

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The longer the EPA stalls, the more it looks as though the White House doesn't believe its own rhetoric about the power of new technology to reduce emissions and slow the rate of climate change. Like the polar ice caps, the administration's vague promises to address global warming just keep melting away.

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