Filling The Bush Gap - Time

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Climate change geeks with a thing for international conferences — like me — were spoilt for choice this past week. You could rub shoulders with national leaders from over 80 countries — or just their junior advisers, depending on the color of your badge — at the United Nations high-level meeting on climate. You could Amtrak down to the White House and hear President George W. Bush tell the world's major economies that this global warming thing might actually be a problem and that we should maybe consider doing something about it eventually. Or you could catch the Clinton Global Initiative's annual meeting in Manhattan, where billionaire executives, extremely smart people and star-struck journalists listened raptly as Brad Pitt detailed his plans to rebuild New Orleans in fabulously green fashion.

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Lobbying has shifted to the corporate world, where large companies like Wal-Mart have implemented energy efficiency polices far more aggressive than anything coming from the government. High-profile celebrities like Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio have made green cool for consumers. And hardly a day goes by without news of a leap forward on solar, wind or hybrid cars, thanks to private investment — again, in the absence of significant government spending.

So what is Washington doing? While it's heartening that President Bush now does seem to believe that global warming is real, this week's meeting of the world's major carbon emitters offered no evidence that he is willing to meet the climate challenge. The President continued to reject Kyoto-style mandatory caps on carbon emissions and instead endorsed an "international clean technology fund" to finance alternative energy projects in developing nations. Nice idea, but meaningless without real spending to back it up. "Bush says we need technology, but spends no money," says Nordhaus. "Bush says we need to reduce emissions, but only voluntarily. Both positions are utterly cynical."

That much was clear to many of the European attendees in Washington, who viewed the summit at best as harmless, and at worst as an attempt to undermine the upcoming UN climate negotiations in Bali at the end of the year. But the good news is that if Bush is unlikely to move on global warming between now and the end of the term, there is another branch of the government that just might. Currently there are several pieces of climate change legislation floating around Congress, and with the Democrats in power, there's a chance that one might pass. "You're actually starting to see Congress talk seriously about commitment to climate change," says Annie Petsonk, international counsel at Environmental Defense. "Foreign countries are starting to recognize that." So it turns out that the hot place to be this week wasn't the UN, or the White House or even Clinton's party in Manhattan. It was Capitol Hill.

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http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1666840,00.html