Greenpeace said yesterday that US President Bush’s new climate strategy was not even too little, too late, but a dangerous sham.

“Bush is clearly running scared on the issue of climate change and of the huge public demand in the US and globally for urgent action,” said John Coequyt of Greenpeace USA.

“This is a slap in the face to one of the US’s key allies, Germany which has rightly made climate a central issue in the G8 this year and has put the emission cuts science demands into the draft G8 communique. The US talk of a “new policy” is also a desperate attempt to head off the start of international negotiations on the next stage of emissions reductions after 2012; it is a distraction from the real task of agreeing emission reductions.”

If Bush wants to act on climate change, the first thing he should do is to put his own country in order by setting a cap on carbon dioxide emissions and supporting a national renewable energy standard. Bush does not have to start a new initiative to agree targets with major emitters, he could simply agree to the targets proposed for the G8 meeting next week. If he does not do that, the other seven G8 members need to move forward without Bush.

A 50% cut in global emissions by 2050 compared to 1990 levels is what science demands and will require industrialized countries to cut their emissions by 30 percent by 2020 and 80-90 percent by 2050.

The place where the world agrees on the necessary climate strategy is the United Nations. The United States should rejoin the efforts under the Kyoto Protocol after 2009 rather than start new processes now that will in any case not yield results before Bush leaves office.

“Rather than be diverted by Bush, the seven Kyoto Protocol members of the G8 should next week commit to radical emission cuts and to concluding a binding agreement under the Kyoto Protocol by 2009 at the latest.”

I think Bush is locked into the old idea of “if we cut emissions and China and India don’t they will get a leg up on us economically.” Well its true, if we slow down our economy (even just a little) to address global warming they will catch up to us in prosperity. The whole idea is that doing business in a green way doesn’t mean that we have to slow the economy down. In fact green technologies open up new areas for growth in a sustainable way. A secondly whats wrong with India or China being as prosperous as the US? Most countries never addressed pollution (be it industrial or political) until they developed a large wealthy middle class. There is also something to be said for the fact that China’s rapid economic growth will make them an economic powerhouse in the years to come weather or not the US slows or speeds up its economic growth. There is really no good reason not to start addressing global warming at a federal level.

China is just now starting to realize that fouling there own nest might not be such a good idea, even if it does mean the economy will grow at 10% a year. The citizens are starting to die in large numbers from pollution. When you have hundreds of millions of people who are sick to death (literally) of living in a polluted hell hole, well as a communist dictatorship that’s something you might want to worry about.

The fact is that the US is still the biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses. WE are the single largest source of global warming gasses. We are morally obligated to do something about that, and Bush with all this crap about waiting and bringing in other countries just doesn’t get it.