Bush sets goal for limiting emissions

WASHINGTON – President Bush set a new target date Wednesday for stopping the growth of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025, presenting a strategy that the scientific community says is too little, too late to prevent dangerous global warming.

Speaking in the White House Rose Garden, Bush acknowledged that climate change is a problem but called for a slow approach to dealing with it that wouldn’t raise taxes, burden American businesses or be run by judges working off the Clean Air Act, which he says wasn’t meant to address climate change.

Bush said the main way to curb U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions was to “rapidly slow the growth” of emissions from the nation’s power plants, which are responsible for about 40 percent of the nation’s emissions, within 10 to 15 years.

He offered no new initiatives to cut the emissions. Instead, he spoke of an “economy-wide strategy that builds on the solid foundation that we have in place,” such as recently passed legislation that raises auto fuel-economy standards to 35 miles per gallon by 2020 as well as tax incentives for private research and new technology to attack the problem.

Scientists, environmental groups and some lawmakers charged that Bush’s recommendations were an attempt to derail more serious climate-change legislation in Congress and to influence international debate.

A consensus report last year by more than 2,000 scientists from around the world called for stronger measures to slow the long-term accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that to prevent average global temperatures from rising more than 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit – the level it set as a danger zone – global emissions would have to peak by 2015. The panel is affiliated with the United Nations.

To keep temperatures from rising above 3.5 degrees, the panel said, industrialized countries would need to reduce emissions by 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. The European Union has recommended doing that.

Bush’s goal would allow emissions to be 28 percent above 1990 levels in 2025, according to calculations made by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.

“In his eighth year, the president has just proposed a path on global warming weaker than the campaign pledge he made in September 2000 and broke three months into office,” said Frances Beinecke, the council’s president.