President Bush dialed up the air conditioner and gave a speech about global warming the other day, something he clearly does not put in the major menace category. His "new initiative" for taking care of the difficulty boils to spending the next fifty years talking about the subject. That's his "new" initiative. What his old initiative may have been he did not say and nobody else can recall his having had one.

With his well-known resistance to specific objectives, benchmarks or timetables any goals which might come out of whatever it is the President is proposing will be strictly "aspirational" to quote the term used by James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, whose additional official duties include teaching the White House staff ballroom dancing.

As we have seen in Iraq setting precise targets drive President Bush crackers. You can imagine what he must be saying about Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, behind her back because she is holding out for "for limiting the worldwide temperature rise this century to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit and cutting global greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050," according to the Washington Post.

Instead the Post describes this newest of new initiatives this way: "'Each country will develop its own national strategies on a midterm basis in the next 10 to 20 years on where they want to take their efforts to improve energy security, reduce air pollution and also reduce greenhouse gases,'" said Connaughton in between sessions prepping the Secretary of the Treasury for his upcoming appearance on Dancing With The Stars.

The important thing to remember about the initiative is that no nation has to do anything except send diplomats to have meetings in pleasant places to hash over the subject. Everything is to be voluntary and extremely free market-ish which we means we do not do it if there is no money in it.

Washington rumor has it that the administration thinks there is more money to be made by encouraging global warming rather than lessening it. The story goes that the brains at NASA have figured out that global warming will lengthen the growing season in Maine, where the Bush family owns property, by six weeks thereby increasing its value. It is believed that by the year 2050 they will be growing pineapples in Nebraska while at the same time, if their calculations are correct, the Chinese will be dying of thirst because the Yellow and Yangtze rivers will be little more than trails of sand and gook.

Since fear of global warming has made welcoming it about as popular as creation theory, President Bush and Karl Rove, his top brain truster, have put out the new initiative as a sop to public opinion while secretly taking steps to turn up the heat. Word is, they intend to appoint a hot czar.

Over the years presidents have learned that czar system can meet any challenge and solve any problem. It was not that long ago that President Bush appointed a war czar and the results are visible every day in the dispatches coming in from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Because of the touchiness of public opinion, especially among the young and ignorant, the Global Warming Czar's appointment will be classified. They say, however, the post has been offered to Paul Wolfowitz with the understanding that his girlfriend seek employment in the private sector.

Comments (1)

1. Here's a pop history quiz for you....

   by what margin did the anti-Kyoto Treaty resolution (the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98) of 1997 pass in the US Senate.

   (Hint---only 55 of the votes were Republican. And it wasn't 55-45)

   Posted by Mask at 06/01/2007 @ 7:59pm