http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0227-05.htm
Published on Thursday,
February 27, 2003 by the Guardian/UK
Advisers Tell Bush Climate Plan is Useless
Strategy 'lacks vision, goals, timetable and criteria'
by Oliver Burkeman in Washington
George Bush's strategy on global warming suffered a setback
yesterday when a panel of scientists convened at the request
of the White House condemned it as lacking vision, and wasting
time and money on research questions that were resolved years
ago.
Mr Bush's plan, introduced
after the US backed out of the
Kyoto protocol, replaces that treaty's call for mandatory
limits on greenhouse gas emissions with a decade-long program
of research to determine the scale of the problem.
But the 17 environmental
experts, assembled by the National
Academy of Sciences at the president's request, said in their
report that the president's strategy "lacks most of the basic
elements of a strategic plan: a guiding vision, executable
goals, clear timetables and criteria for measuring progress",
and misses the opportunity to cooperate more with other
countries on research.
"I've been doing
ecosystems science for 30 years, and
we know what we know and what we don't know," William
Schlesinger, a panel member, told the Guardian. "Rather
than focusing on the things we don't know, it's almost
as if parts of the plan were written by people who are
totally unfamiliar with where ecosystems science is coming
from.
"They say we ought
to be monitoring methane in remote regions,"
said Dr Schlesinger, the dean of Duke University's Nicholas
School of the Environment and Earth Sciences in Durham,
North Carolina. "Well, we've been monitoring some of these
things for 30 years, and there's no question that the levels
are rising."
The Bush plan also
urges, for example, more research
on how carbon emissions are affected by forest fires,
a question largely seen as resolved within the academy.
"They didn't set
the hard priorities," said Michael Prather,
an earth scientist from the University of California at
Irvine and a panel member. "From the scientists' point
of view, we have a pretty good idea of what is happening."
The experts also call
for "greatly increased" spending
on addressing climate change, far above the $1.7bn per
year earmarked. They concede that the plan is "a solid
foundation", going further towards formulating a strategy
on global warming research - as required by a 1990 act
of Congress - than either the first President Bush or
Bill Clinton.
James Mahoney, director
of the government's climate change
science program, which is charged with executing the plan,
said he welcomed the panel's criticisms. "Nobody ever
undertook to do something like this before. There are
certainly areas where we need to improve," he said.
"But we're in a process where we pushed to very quickly
turn around a battleship, and we've never had a plan before."
But the scientists'
findings may cause concern in the
administration in the few weeks of the consultation period
that remain, not least because the panel included experts
from corporations including BP and Honeywell.
Mr Bush has been accused
of claiming that more research
is needed in order to stall moves towards limiting
US greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental groups
accuse the oil company Exxon Mobil of leading a campaign
in the US to discredit scientific findings suggesting
that the dangers of global warming are grave.
"There's no question
that if you claim that not much
is known, even if it is, then you delay the time
at which you can say, OK, the research is unequivocal
and we need to do something about the problem,"
Dr Schlesinger said. "It's not very far beneath
the surface that there's an element of not taking
any action here."
© Guardian Newspapers
Limited 2003
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