Bush to Global Warming: Mission Accomplished

Good ol' George Bush. He's on a roll. After winning the war in Iraq in a matter of weeks and then declaring victory, he's been off to other challenges.

One of those is global warming. Well, check off another mission accomplished box, because last week the Bush Administration announced its plan to lick this scourge as well.

The document, a 244 page report from the Department of Energy, titled "Climate Change Technology Program Strategic Plan" basically says lets use voluntary initiatives and technology to lick global warming.

I guess this guy really is serious about the issue. After all, six years of work and 244 pages--that's a real plan there pardner!

That ain't all--Bush proposes to spend a good $3 billion a year on research to come up with those great new technologies.

The plan suggests that hydrogen cars will be the solution.

In other words, just as we suspected, Bush is paying, at most, lip service to global warming, taking six years to lay out a band-aid approach to a serious problem. He'll probably name as director of the program some crony from one of the phony "scientific" organizations that question global warming.

Don't get us wrong--hydrogen cars are great. But they won't happen for another 30 years unless we adopt government policies that favor their development and adoption. You'll never see this administration, or any other Republican administration--beholden as they are to Big Oil--seriously push such initiatives. (Bush hasn't even followed up on his State of the Union pledge to raise fuel economy requirements for cars.)

While Bush has fiddled for the past 6 years, what has his predecessor, Bill Clinton, been up to?

Last week he got a $3 billion pledge from Richard Branson, of Virgin, to invest in new technologies, adding to another roughly $5 billion in pledges Clinton's initiative has rounded up so far.

Even that, of course, is just a drop in the bucket, but at least it's a start.

What we need is a comprehensive national policy with some clear goals and a set of policy initiatives designed to reach those goals. Don't count on it anytime soon. The next President will have to start at the beginning, at least 8 years behind. What a waste!