US Lawmakers Urge Bush to Weigh Mandatory CO2 Caps
Date: 26-Sep-07
Country: US
Author: Chris Baltimore
Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, who are both pressing forward with legislation to cap US industrial emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, urged President Bush to do the same when he meets with global leaders Thursday and Friday.
"The US and the world's other developed countries ... will need to achieve reductions on the order of 60 to 80 percent" by the middle of the century, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in a letter to Bush.
The White House event, billed as a "Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change," is expected to include the leaders of some of the world's biggest contributors to global warming: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, China, Canada, India, Brazil, Russia, Australia, Indonesia and South Africa.
The United States is the biggest global emitter of carbon dioxide, one of several greenhouse gases blamed for melting glaciers and rising sea levels.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will host the meeting.
The big question is what will replace the Kyoto Protocol when the binding emissions targets for 36 developed countries expire in 2012.
The meeting will follow a high-level United Nations session this week aimed at gathering momentum for a meeting in Bali, Indonesia, in December, where negotiators will start work on a climate treaty to succeed the Kyoto pact.
The United States has never been part of the Kyoto pact, with Bush having said its economic costs make it "fundamentally flawed." But the president has been vocal recently about the need for a new strategy to curb climate-warming emissions.
In May, Bush announced plans to develop the strategy by the end of 2008, which critics were quick to point out is less than a month before the end of his second and final term.
Congressional leaders criticized Bush for limiting his support so far to nonbinding pledges to curb greenhouse gases.
"This voluntary approach, Mr. President, cannot succeed in staving off catastrophic climate change impacts," Pelosi and Reid said.
The White House Council on Environmental Quality, which coordinates the administration's environmental policies, said the administration has already proposed a "wide variety of mandatory, voluntary and incentive-based programs aimed at aggressively addressing climate change."
Those include Bush's proposal to reduce US gasoline use by 20 percent by 2010 by using more ethanol and requiring higher vehicle fuel efficiency.
