Chris Mooney wrote one of the best reviews of President Bush's State of the Union speech from the climate change angle this week. Chris is author of The Republican War on Science and has a new book coming soon called Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming.
The idea that George W. Bush—even a politically chastened, unpopular, lame duck George W. Bush—might fundamentally reverse his position on carbon caps and, by implication, enter into a post-Kyoto embrace with Europe turned out to be exceedingly farfetched. Bush had never so much as mentioned "global warming" or "climate change" in any of his five State of the Union speeches up to this point. Last night, he barely improved upon that record, mouthing the phrase "global climate change" once and only once and vaguely suggesting that it should be dealt with through un-described technological advancements.
Chris correctly predicted on his blog that Bush would not propose carbon caps or offer anything substantial in the way of mitigation measures. The present approach of the Bush Administration, as well as some oil companies, is to give lip service to the possibility that humans are altering the climate so that they don't look like complete idiots, while emphasizing "scientific uncertainties," thereby providing themselves a loophole to continue conducting business as usual. Chris points to Andrew Revkin's recent NY Times article, which reported that, according to drafts of a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), "it is more than 90 percent likely that global warming since 1950 has been driven mainly by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases, and that more warming and rising sea levels are on the way."