The Man With Two Faces

After haranguing and negotiation, the United States reluctantly "agreed" to a flawed agreement at Bali, which allowed Bush to gain a symbolic victory without being pigeonholed into actually doing anything about climate change. Now, just mere hours after signing the document, Bush is backing away from it.

In a statement, Perino said that aspects the U.S. particularly welcomes include a recognition of the importance of technology in the solution and the role of industry agreements.

But, she said, "the United States does have serious concerns" because the U.N.-sponsored talks have "not yet fully given effect to the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities."

Specifically, commitments for emissions cuts cannot be required from developed countries alone, as that would be insufficient to reduce global warming and would be unfair. "Major developing economies must likewise act," Perino said.

Also, requirements of developing countries must be set to reflect factors such as the size of a nation's economy or its emissions level, she said.

So, shorter George Bush: "My word doesn't mean a damn thing."

This Is How You Deal With A Bully

The United States has steadfastly blocked any efforts to put in mandatory caps on greenhouse gases at the Bali climate change talks. In response, European leaders said they wouldn't attend Bush's stupid "See, I'm doing SOMETHING" meeting on climate change scheduled for next year. Bush wants this meeting to give the impression that he's committed to further action on the issue. As a result, the United States is budging a bit.

At a news conference, Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, who on Thursday raised serious concerns about the slow pace of the talks, said that countries were “on the brink of agreement.”

“It’s not actually all that much that is outstanding,” he said. “People are working very hard to resolve outstanding issues.”

Negotiations were continuing but the tenor of the conference improved markedly from Thursday when, amid growing frustration with the United States, European nations threatened to boycott separate talks proposed by the Bush administration in Hawaii next month.

In addition to threatening Bush with something he wanted, the assembled countries recognized that he's a lame duck, and decided to essentially ignore his concerns, in the hopes that a new (Democratic) President will be more amenable to emissions targets.

Can we send Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to Bali so they understand how you deal with a bully? You threaten to take away something they want and you de-emphasize their power. Everything the nations of the world did in Bali could be done in the US Congress.

Milquetoast Democratic Action Expands Globally

Looks like the world is taking lessons from the Democrats:

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon conceded Wednesday that the United States had succeeded in achieving one of its key objectives at the climate conference here, blocking a proposal that called on industrialized nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 25 to 40 percent by 2020.

Having jettisoned the idea of incorporating specific emissions targets in the framework that will guide international climate talks over the next two years, participants were hoping to find other ways to make meaningful progress here in the two-week-long meeting of nearly 190 nations.

The world is figuring out that an obstinate, ornery, obstructionist party of NO wields a lot of power. The Bush team and the Republicans in Congress don't play by the rules. And nobody's ever changed the rules on them to outmaneuver them. I agree with Rep. Wexler, impeachment hearings would be a chip the Congress could use to force compliance.

"The way we pass stem-cell research, the way we get implemented a children's health care plan, the way we get higher CAFE [corporate average fuel economy] standards to bring our energy debacle into a better condition for generations to come is to have impeachment hearings," Wexler said, appearing to nearly run out breath at one point during his speech. "Because that'll get the president's eye. That'll get the vice president's eye. That for the first time will show that the Democratic majority is here, and that in fact we have the courage of our convictions, and that we're not bound to be tied by conventional wisdom."

Somebody needs to change the game on these folks. There are too few leaders around the nation and around the world willing to do that.

UPDATE: Al Gore says what's needed to be said.

“My own country the United States is principally responsible for obstructing progress in Bali.”

Head Unmooring From Body Alert

It's OK that the US won't allow hard emissions targets in this round of climate change talks, because the Pope has attacked the "climate change prophets of doom", appealing to the world to rely on science and not ideology.

I'm going to repeat that.

The Pope is calling on the world to rely on science, and not ideology.

Pardon me while I pick up my head from the ground.

The Great Global Warming Swindle

No, it's not that it doesn't exist, it's the systematic suppression of evidence from our government over the last seven years that the planet is warming up.

For the past 16 months, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been investigating allegations of political interference with government climate change science under the Bush Administration [...] The evidence before the Committee leads to one inescapable conclusion: the Bush Administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming.

In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute developed an internal “Communications Action Plan” that stated: “Victory will be achieved when … average citizens ‘understand’ uncertainties in climate science … [and] recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’” The Bush Administration has acted as if the oil industry’s communications plan were its mission statement. White House officials and political appointees in the agencies censored congressional testimony on the causes and impacts of global warming, controlled media access to government climate scientists, and edited federal scientific reports to inject unwarranted uncertainty into discussions of climate change and to minimize the threat to the environment and the economy.

The White House would block media requests to speak with climate change scientists on their payroll. They would rewrite reports to tone down the language in them. They would edit testimony to Congress from leading scientists. They did everything you can think of to mitigate any public awareness of climate change, and any groundswell for federal action. The overriding concern was that the Administration knew they were vulnerable if actual science was the parameter of the debate. So they sought to undermine the science. The full report is here.

Let's not pretend that the Administration is acting alone here. There's a great bonanza of conservative noise machine pushback on climate change, all funded by think tanks like the American Petroleum Institute. There seems to be a story like this every other week.

On 8 November many who would deny that human activity has anything to do with global warming were agog at news of a paper entitled "Carbon dioxide production by benthic bacteria: the death of manmade global warming theory?" by Daniel A. Klein of the Department of Climatology, University of Arizona and colleagues (Journal of Geoclimatic Studies, vol 23, p 273). It was just what they wanted to hear [...]

According to bloggers, a well-known UK social anthropologist sent out an alert about the paper to a climate-sceptic email list - and withdrew it an hour or two later. Why? Because neither the authors nor their institutions nor the journal exist. A teensy clue might have been found in the inclusion of equations that are not only nonsensical but irreproducible here, due to their imaginative use of Thai and Serbian Cyrillic characters - alongside suspiciously perfect graphs. Then there was a list of other papers in the alleged journal - including, wonderfully, "Submarine lightning strikes in the Hadean Zone: an unacknowledged cause of fish mortality?"

But clearly, this is playing out most starkly on the federal level, where the resistance to doing anything to solve the climate crisis has spilled over to Bali and the UN conference aimed at hammering out a new international agreement. The chief climate negotiator has rejected any specific targets for emission reductions and refused to signal anything but a willingness to continue talking. They simply want to run out the clock, as they have on so many policies. But on this one, there simply isn't that kind of time.

We have a few leaders on this issue fighting for science and sanity. John Kerry was in Bali on Monday delivering strong remarks. Ed Markey, the chief Democrat on this issue in the House, gave an address using an avatar in Second Life. And there's also Al Gore. On the same day that Henry Waxman's Oversight Committee released their report about White House suppression of the problem, Gore was accepting his prize from the Nobel committee, delivering one of the more powerful speeches on the subject you'll ever see, appealing to the moral fiber of those charged with making these decisions.

In the last few months, it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter. Major cities in North and South America, Asia and Australia are nearly out of water due to massive droughts and melting glaciers. Desperate farmers are losing their livelihoods. Peoples in the frozen Arctic and on low-lying Pacific islands are planning evacuations of places they have long called home. Unprecedented wildfires have forced a half-million people from their homes in one country and caused a national emergency that almost brought down the government in another.

Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself. Now, we and the earth's climate are locked in a relationship familiar to war planners: "Mutually assured destruction."

As the American poet Robert Frost wrote, "Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice." Either, he notes, "would suffice."

But neither need be our fate. It is time to make peace with the planet.

We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war. These prior struggles for survival were won when leaders found words at the 11th hour that released a mighty surge of courage, hope and readiness to sacrifice for a protracted and mortal challenge.

The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote, "One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door."

The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: "What were you thinking; why didn't you act?"

Or they will ask instead: "How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?"

We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource. So let us renew it, and say together: "We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act."

Gore is due in Bali tomorrow, and he is heartened by a people-powered movement to commit to real change. Unfortunately, people can't do it alone; they need leaders willing to listen, and set the emissions targets needed to mitigate the worst effects.

Like They're Trying To Destroy Their Own Credibility

The UN climate change conference kicks off today in Bali, Indonesia, parts of which are sinking, by the way. And the Republicans are sending a representative from the Senate Environment Committee. Obviously they're looking to burnish their standing by sending someone of stature, of renown, of credibili...

Larry WHO???

Craig is traveling to Bali this week for the U.N.-led climate change conference as the “Republican representative from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee,” which is led by chief global warming denier Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK).

Prior to his travels, Craig attacked EPW Chairwoman Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) for creating “all-pain, no-gain” climate change legislation that would call for caps on greenhouse gas emissions. It “demonstrates nothing more than her intent to revert the United States to a developing country,” he asserted.

Now, Washington to Bali is a long flight. It may not have been nonstop. My point is that there are a lot of airport bathrooms between here and there.

By the way, this comes on the heels of another devastating story from several men claiming they either received sex or sexual advances from Craig, which he categorically denied. Obviously, Bali is off the beaten path for political reporters looking to Craig for comment.

In a way, Craig is the perfect symbol for the GOP message on global warming: discredited, in denial, untrustworthy.