Another Bush Administration Global Warming Delay?

As California takes on global warming by setting real targets for pollution reduction, the Bush administration continues to drag its feet.

Remember how the U.S. Supreme Court told the federal government it must act to stop the pollution that causes climate change? Well, as predicted earlier this week by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Bush administration will continue to defy the Court today by issuing a request for additional comments — an "Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking"— on global warming regulations, rather than the so-called "endangerment determination" that the Court's ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA compelled and that senior Environmental Protection Agency officials had argued for.

Today's Washington Post details the tireless efforts of senior political appointees in the administration to prevent global warming regulations from being in put in place under President Bush... the same President Bush who this week called global warming a "serious problem."

David Bookbinder, Sierra Club's Chief Climate Counsel and the attorney who's defending California's Clean Car Law, had this to say about the Bush administration's latest delay in addressing global warming:

"Today's action caps off eight years of catastrophic negligence on the part
of an increasingly irrelevant administration, and removes whatever shadow of a
doubt that may have existed about whether it was going to fail to live up to its
obligations to the American public, the law, and the Supreme Court to do
something real on global warming.

"The American public, Congress, world leaders, and even career government
officials are counting down the days until this administration leaves town and a
new president undoes the damage done by President Bush and makes up for nearly a decade of lost time — time we didn't have to waste in the first place. And the
first thing the next administration will do is toss the Advanced Notice of
Proposed Rulemaking into the circular file.

"Stephen Johnson should have left his post long ago, but today's action underscores his complete and utter lack of credibility. Johnson will be remembered not for his decades of public service, but rather for his unswerving fealty to the misguided policies of a failed administration.

"This global warming melodrama has all the set pieces of classic Bush administration political theater: politics coming before science, outright deception of the American public and Congressional investigators, willful disregard for the law and courts, and political meddling at the highest levels to protect favored special interests--with the dark hand of the Vice President visible throughout. Thankfully this drama is near the end of its final act."