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Strategy To Curb Greenhouse Gases Is Revised

WASHINGTON (AP) - Revising his position on global warming, President George W. Bush proposed a new target for stopping the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2025.

The president also said electric power plants should put the brakes on greenhouse gas emissions with 15 years.

The new White House climate initiative comes as Bush appears, in the view of congressional Democrats and environmentalists, to be increasingly irrelevant in the climate debate both on the domestic and international stage.

All three presidential candidates - Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama and Republican John McCain - favor a more aggressive program on climate change than does Bush, all supporting mandatory limits on greenhouse gases.

The United States and other countries agreed at a meeting in December in Bali, Indonesia, to work to set firm targets for reducing greenhouse emissions by the end of 2009, as a follow-up to the Kyoto reduction targets that expire in 2012. The United States rejected the Kyoto agreement.

Senate Democratic leaders plan to begin debate in June on legislation that would cap greenhouse gases and allow polluters to ease some of the cost by buying emissions credits. This cap-and-trade approach is aimed at cutting the emissions by 70 percent by 2050. The House of Representatives also is moving toward considering a cap-and-trade proposal. And many industry lobbyists have become resigned to some type of cap-and-trade proposal moving forward, if not this year probably next, and are trying to find ways to limit the damage.

“ The key is whether the president supports a mandatory cap on emissions,” said Tony Kreindler, a climate specialist at the advocacy group Environmental Defense. “You never achieve any real reductions in pollution without legal limits. That’s what we’re going to be looking for.”

“ To reach our 2025 goal, we will need to more rapidly slow the growth of power sector greenhouse gas emissions so that they peak within 10 to 15 years, and decline thereafter,” Bush said in excerpts of the speech released early by the White House.

“ By doing so, we will reduce emission levels in the power sector well below where they were projected to be when we first announced our climate strategy in 2002. There are a number of ways to achieve these reductions, but all responsible approaches depend on accelerating the development and deployment of new technologies.”

Bush was not to outline a specific proposal, but he will lay out a strategy for “realistic” emission reduction targets and “principles” he thinks Congress should follow in crafting global warming legislation.

The new goal for curtailing greenhouse gas emissions is an attempt to short-circuit what White House aides call a potential regulatory “train wreck” if Congress does not act on climate change. The president’s speech is aimed at shaping the debate on global warming in favor of solving the problem while avoiding heavy costs to industry and the economy.

The Bush administration has been a staunch opponent of a mandatory so-called “cap-and-trade” approach to reducing greenhouse gases. While it has backed some mandatory programs, it has preferred largely voluntary measures to to broadly address global warming. In his speech, however, the president will not slam the door on discussing market-based approaches to stem the rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

“ We aren’t necessarily against cap-and-trade proposals,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said. But she added quickly, “What we’ve seen so far from Congress is not something that we can support.”

The president remains opposed to a Senate bill that would require mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions, calling that proposed unrealistic and economically harmful. “I believe that congressional debate should be guided by certain core principles and a clear appreciation that there is a wrong way and a right way to approach reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” Bush said. “Bad legislation would impose tremendous costs on our economy and American families without accomplishing the important climate change goals we share.”

Meanwhile, many environmentalists maintain that the congressional debate may be overtaken by the courts - the same prospect the White House is fretting over.

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