Shocking as it may seem, President Bush’s voluntary pollution control efforts don’t seem to having much of an impact:
Two years after President Bush declared he could combat global warming without mandatory controls, the administration has launched a broad array of initiatives and research, yet it has had little success in recruiting companies to voluntarily curb their greenhouse gas emissions, according to official documents, reports and interviews.
At the heart of the president’s strategy is “Climate Leaders,” a program that recruits the nation’s industrial polluters to voluntarily devise ways to curb their emissions by 10 percent or more in the coming decade. Scientists believe these greenhouse gas emissions, which include carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, are contributing to a troubling rise in the earth’s temperature that could disrupt weather patterns and cause flooding.
Only a tiny fraction of the thousands of U.S. companies with pollution problems — 50 in all — have joined Climate Leaders, and of the companies that have signed up, only 14 have set goals. Many of the companies that are volunteering say they did so either because reducing emissions makes good economic sense or because they were being nudged by state and federal regulators.
Who could have ever imagined that the worst polluters–power and utility companies–would simply ignore taking costly steps to curb pollution? Accordingly, it’s been “business as usual” with little change:
The president’s more immediate goal, announced on Valentine’s Day 2002, is to reduce greenhouse gas intensity — the amount of gas put into the atmosphere per unit of economy — by 18 percent over the next 10 years. Congress’s research arm, the General Accounting Office, concluded in October that Bush’s plan would reduce overall emissions only 2 percentage points below what the nation would achieve with no federal program whatsoever.
You can’t fault the administration for trying, however. Just look at all the resources they’re pouring into the effort:
Although Climate Leaders represents the cutting edge of Bush’s strategy, it has a budget of $1 million a year and a full-time staff of three, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, which runs the program.
A staff of three? To run a national program? Overwhelming.
There’s a real opportunity for the Democrats to make the environment an issue this fall if they know how to run with it.