The Prez has a long history of misleading the nation on climate change. Not unlike his father, who promised on the stump to be the "environmental president," Bush promised on the campaign trail in 2000 to reduce CO2 emissions, then promptly reversed this position once he took office.
But that’s in the history books. Last week, according to the Washington Post, he told an audience at a fundraiser in Washington state:
Do you realize that the United States is the only major industrialized nation that cut greenhouse gases last year?
One problem: that’s, er, misleading at best. A spokesperson for the Council on Environmental Quality admitted so after the speech, saying that although the U.S. did slightly reduce energy consumption and thus emissions last year, it couldn’t rule out the possibility that other nations did as well.
"We are making sure the President is aware of that," the spokesperson said.
Michael Abramowitz of the Post politely adds:
How much the Bush administration influenced this [1.3 percent decline in emissions] is another question. The Energy Information Administration offered two major explanations for the decline: The first, a cooler summer and a warmer winter, had nothing to do with Bush. The other explanation was that cleaner power sources such as natural gas and non-fossil fuels are coming online in the electrical industry — another area where Bush’s pull seems minimal, at best.
Since the Prez’s father signed a bill in l990 authorizing the creation of a research group to investigate the threat of climate change, countless Canadian forests have been pulped in the mostly fruitless discussion over global warming, while carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. have risen almost 18 percent.
(h/t: ThinkProgress.)
