What a nice weekend gift! The best president in my lifetime just slammed the worst president in my lifetime.
MONTREAL, Quebec (AP) — Former U.S. President Bill Clinton told a global audience of diplomats, environmentalists and others on Friday that the Bush administration is “flat wrong” in claiming that reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to fight global warming would damage the U.S. economy.
“Flat wrong.” That’s Clintonian for “batshit crazy”.
With a “serious disciplined effort” to develop energy-saving technology, he said, “we could meet and surpass the Kyoto targets in a way that would strengthen and not weaken our economies.”
“There’s no longer any serious doubt that climate change is real, acclerating and caused by human activities,” said Clinton, whose address was interrupted repeatedly by enthusiastic applause.
“We are uncertain about how deep and the time of arrival of the consequences, but we are quite clear they will not be good.”
That’s what I always say in global warming arguments. The anti-Kyoto wingnuts will say that we’re just in a natural warming cycle, or cow farts cause more greenhouse emissions than cars, or our contribution to warming is miniscule compared to natural factors. Yeah, so? If 99% of global warming comes from natural causes, does that mean we don’t work on the 1% we can control? Maybe global warming is naturally inevitable, but does that mean we should hurry it along, or should we try to forestall it for a generation or two?
Efforts by host-country Canada and others to draw the United States into the process were failing. The Bush administration says it favors a voluntary approach, not global negotiations, to deal with climate issues.
Because depending on countries and corporations to voluntarily police their environmental messes has worked so well in the past.
“It’s such a pity the United States is still very much unwilling to join the international community, to have a multilateral effort to deal with climate change,” said Kenya’s Emily Ojoo Massawa, chair of the African group of nations at the conference.
Don’t take it personally, Emily. We’re not much into multinational efforts or the opinions of the international community anymore. Yer either with us or against us!
A broad scientific consensus agrees that these gases accumulating in the atmosphere, byproducts of automobile engines, power plants and other fossil fuel-burning industries, contributed significantly to the past century’s global temperature rise of 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.7 degree Celsius). Continued warming is expected to disrupt the global climate.
In the late 1990s the U.S. Senate balked at ratifying Kyoto, and the incoming President Bush in 2001 formally renounced the accord, saying it would harm the U.S. economy.
And besides, that’s his job.
