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Advisers: Bush climate plan ‘lacks vision, goals, timetable, and criteria’

By Oliver Burkeman

Washington, DC, Feb. 27— George Bush’s strategy on global warming suffered a setback yesterday when a panel of scientists convened at the request of the White House condemned it as lacking vision, and wasting time and money on research questions that were resolved years ago.

Bush’s plan, introduced after the US backed out of the Kyoto Protocol, replaces that treaty’s call for mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions with a decade-long program of research to determine the scale of the problem.

But the 17 environmental experts, assembled by the National Academy of Sciences at the president’s request, said in their report that the president’s strategy “lacks most of the basic elements of a strategic plan: a guiding vision, executable goals, clear timetables and criteria for measuring progress,” and misses the opportunity to cooperate more with other countries on research.

“I’ve been doing ecosystems science for 30 years, and we know what we know and what we don’t know,” William Schlesinger, a panel member, told the Guardian. “Rather than focusing on the things we don’t know, it’s almost as if parts of the plan were written by people who are totally unfamiliar with where ecosystems science is coming from.

“They say we ought to be monitoring methane in remote regions,” said Dr. Schlesinger, the dean of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences in Durham, North Carolina. “Well, we’ve been monitoring some of these things for 30 years, and there’s no question that the levels are rising.”

The Bush plan also urges, for example, more research on how carbon emissions are affected by forest fires, a question largely seen as resolved within the academy.

“They didn’t set the hard priorities,” said Michael Prather, an earth scientist from the University of California at Irvine and a panel member. “From the scientists’ point of view, we have a pretty good idea of what is happening.”

The experts also call for “greatly increased” spending on addressing climate change, far above the $1.7 billion per year earmarked. They concede that the plan is “a solid foundation,” going further towards formulating a strategy on global warming research — as required by a 1990 act of Congress — than either the first President Bush or Bill Clinton.

James Mahoney, director of the government’s climate change science program, which is charged with executing the plan, said he welcomed the panel’s criticisms. “Nobody ever undertook to do something like this before. There are certainly areas where we need to improve,” he said. “But we’re in a process where we pushed to very quickly turn around a battleship, and we’ve never had a plan before.”

But the scientists’ findings may cause concern in the administration in the few weeks of the consultation period that remain, not least because the panel included experts from corporations including BP and Honeywell.

Bush has been accused of claiming that more research is needed in order to stall moves towards limiting US greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental groups accuse the oil company Exxon Mobil of leading a campaign in the US to discredit scientific findings suggesting that the dangers of global warming are grave.

“There’s no question that if you claim that not much is known, even if it is, then you delay the time at which you can say, OK, the research is unequivocal and we need to do something about the problem,” Dr. Schlesinger said. “It’s not very far beneath the surface that there’s an element of not taking any action here.”

Source: Guardian (UK)