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"Okashii na... namida ga nagareteru. Hitotsu mo kanashikunai no ni."
(That's funny... my tears are falling. And I'm not sad at all.) - Quatre Raberba Winner

quote:

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The Earth has warmed and cooled many, many times over its history.

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Warmed and cooled yes, but show me some point in time where it's jumped so much so fast. I suspect you would have to go back to just before the last ice age to come close.

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I DO NOT ENJOY BOTH GENDERS!!!
Ultra Magnus

quote:

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By Amy Goldstein and Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 15, 2001; Page A01

At midmorning on Tuesday, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman arrived at the White House to tell President Bush about her recent meeting in Italy with European environmental ministers. While Whitman was in the Oval Office, however, the president broke an awkward piece of news.

Even though Whitman had spent the past month touting a proposal that would for the first time limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants�a position Bush had embraced six months ago during his campaign�the president had decided to send a letter to four GOP senators, disclosing that he had changed his mind.

The seven-paragraph letter�dispatched that afternoon, barely two weeks after objections began to surface on Capitol Hill�came in response to a concerted pressure campaign from senior congressional Republicans and lobbyists from the coal and oil industries.

In a single meeting March 5, Bush decided he simply had been wrong to name carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Over the next days, the White House staff and agency representatives abandoned the notion of moving to restrict emissions of the substance.

The hasty retreat on a significant campaign pledge�hailed by environmentalists as a breakthrough when Bush made it�reflects the new administration's eagerness to avoid antagonizing a narrowly divided Congress, especially the Senate with its 50-50 split between Democrats and Republicans.

Indeed, the White House began to rethink its views on emissions in late February, as the president was preparing to outline his $1.6 trillion, 10-year tax cut proposal and spending priorities in a nationally televised address to Congress. At a time when Bush was trying to create momentum for the tax cut�his paramount legislative objective�Nicholas E. Calio, the White House legislative liaison, began to warn that the emissions proposal was causing trouble and might need to be rethought, administration sources said.

Last week, during two meetings that White House staff members convened with representatives from a half-dozen agencies to reconsider the administration's stance on carbon dioxide, few argued the issue on overtly political grounds, according to sources familiar with the deliberations. But aside from the EPA, the sources said, officials from each agency agreed with Vice President Cheney, the Office of Management and Budget, and White House economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey that the policy should be reversed. By Tuesday, Cheney personally delivered news of the change during a meeting with Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Yesterday, Bush explained his change of heart on substantive grounds. "I was responding to reality," he said during a visit to East Brunswick, N.J. "And reality is the nation has got a real problem when it comes to energy."

Echoing the reasoning in his two-page letter, the president said that limits on carbon dioxide emissions would further tilt reliance from coal to natural gas to generate electricity and drive up energy costs when energy supplies already are low in parts of the country. Asked what has changed since the campaign, Bush replied, "We're in an energy crisis now."

White House officials, meanwhile, sought to ward off any suggestion that Bush's reversal had undercut his EPA administrator, emphasizing that Whitman had been a faithful advocate of the position the president adopted as part of his campaign's energy policy.

That policy stated that, while promoting electricity and renewable energy, Bush would work to make the air cleaner. For the first time, he said in a speech in September, he would require all power plants to meet standards to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, as well as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury.

Yesterday, Dan Bartlett, a campaign official who now is a senior White House communications adviser, said that position had been developed by "basically internal staff" who patterned the approach after the policy Bush adopted while governor of Texas. In Texas, however, carbon dioxide was not included.

Lynn Scarlett, president of the libertarian Reason Foundation in Los Angeles and an environmental adviser to the Bush campaign, recalled she had been "personally surprised" when Bush endorsed tough carbon emissions standards. She said his position seemed to conflict with his opposition to the terms of an international global warming agreement reached in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997. The United States has not ratified the accord.

But in general, the campaign position attracted little notice. "It did not raise a lot of objections at the time," Bartlett recalled.

Once Bush took office, however, Whitman began to speak out on the issue, alarming conservative GOP senators such as Chuck Hagel (Neb.), Larry E. Craig (Idaho), Jesse Helms (N.C.) and Pat Roberts (Kan.), who dispute the seriousness of global warming.

On the eve of Bush's maiden speech to Congress Feb. 27, Whitman declared on CNN's "Crossfire" program that the president "is very sensitive to the issue of global warming" and would fulfill his campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide emissions as well as other greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere and are widely believed to contribute to the Earth's rising temperature.

Calio's office began to get loud complaints from Capitol Hill.

The complaints were significant enough that Bush's domestic policy advisers raised them during a March 5 meeting with the president. Before that meeting ended, Bartlett recalled, Bush made the decision that he had erred in listing carbon dioxide as a pollutant, because it was not classified as one in the Clean Air Act�a conclusion that some environmentalists dispute.

The president assigned a small working group, led by John Bridgeland, the White House's deputy domestic policy adviser, to "take the pulse of the Cabinet" on the broader question of whether power plants should be required nevertheless to limit emissions of the substance.

Last Wednesday and Friday, Bridgeland and other members of the president and vice president's staff held hour-long meetings with what was dubbed a "carbon rump group," made up of representatives from the Commerce, Energy, Interior, State and Transportation departments, as well as the EPA.

By the end, Bartlett said, "there wasn't a show of hands. But the consensus was that a serious reevaluation was necessary on that position. That much was clear."

Over the weekend, a smaller group of White House staffers drafted the letter to the four GOP senators, who had asked the administration to clarify its views on global climate change. Some at last week's meetings had broached the idea of leaving open the possibility of regulating carbon emissions in the future. "That was not a consideration" while the letter was being drafted, Bartlett said.

By Monday evening, Bush received a copy. His staff planned to discuss it with him Tuesday afternoon. But by the time Whitman arrived at 10 a.m., the president already had made up his mind.

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Star Trek Gamma Quadrant
Average Rated 6.27 out of 10 Smileys by Fabrux (with four eps posted)
***
"Oh, yes, screw logic, let's go for a theory with no evidence!"
-Omega 11:48am, Jan. 19th, 2001
****
And homeschooling also turns you into a socially well-adjusted person, capable of talking to people without them wanting to ram a f***ing chair down your throat! - PsyLiam, 3/11/01

Not that his original position wasn't completely stupid, but, hey, everyone makes mistakes.

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"People have the right to discriminate based on religion."
-Omega, Jan 26
"There is no "seperation of church and state" in the Constitution"
-Omega, Jan 30
"A private business has the right to refuse service to any person or group, be they KKK, black, gay, or neo-nazi, regardless of reason."
-Omega, Feb 24

Still, you can't argue that (in the UK at least), pollution has gone down a lot since the 50s. Ooh, the horror stories our parents would tell us about the dreaded London smog...

Then you might run into an even more difficult situation. "I'm sorry, Mr. Smith. You've breathed out way too much CO₂ today. I'm going to have to ask you to stop breathing, or face being fined."

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"Goverment exists to serve, not to lead. We do not exist by its volition, it exists by ours. Bear that in mind when you insult your neighbors for refusing to bow before it." J. Richmond

Oop, Jeff beat me to that one...

Verily I say unto you, volcanoes have erupted on Earth since before I was here.

That being said, this whole 'it's nature' thing is a pretty good red herring for the fact that 6 billion humans have come to inhabit this here earth...all together regardless of their many attempts to kill of various others...and those 6 billion human being spew tremendous amounts of material into the sky.

And come to think of it, most of the credible postulations point out that yes, Sally, global climate change is a natural occurrence, but that the rate of change of recent times isn't going at a natural speed. Odly enough, that seems to correspond to the time when most of those 6 billion people came to be alive at the same time on this great blue-green ball of ours.

Or Blue-brown skied ball of ours.

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The negotiations have failed. Shoot him!
~ C. Montgomery Burns

Look here. It may be a commentary, but it has facts that I've been looking for.

Neither you or your commentary deny that Double U said it during his campaign. And yet, here we have another one of those patented Blanket Statements.

Dumb.

Ass.

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The negotiations have failed. Shoot him!
~ C. Montgomery Burns

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Star Trek Gamma Quadrant
Average Rated 7.64 out of 10 Smileys by Fabrux (with six eps posted)
***
"Oh, yes, screw logic, let's go for a theory with no evidence!"
-Omega 11:48am, Jan. 19th, 2001
****
And homeschooling also turns you into a socially well-adjusted person, capable of talking to people without them wanting to ram a f***ing chair down your throat! - PsyLiam, 3/11/01