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U.S. releases latest Climate Change Strategic Plan |
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The Bush Administration has just released a Climate Change Technology Program Strategic Plan. According to the press release the Plan "details measures to accelerate the development and reduce the cost of new and advanced technologies that avoid, reduce, or capture and store greenhouse gas emissions". While the overall scope of this effort is laudable and many of the separate elements are certainly worth pursuing, the general approach is to deceive the public by making it appear as though there were some kind of concerted U.S. effort to reduce greenhouse gases.
The normal approach to strategic planning would be to identify the problem and then prioritize the approaches to solving the problem. Instead what we have here is a patchwork of programs which were being pursued for many other reasons and which could have an important impact on future climate conditions. And even the programs that are described may be relegated to the unfunded mandates category that is so prominently a feature of this government. While the current Fusion Energy Sciences Program is described as part of this Plan, the actual timescales for carrying out the necessary research are vague or nonexistent.
The entire report is available at the Climate Technology website . The curious reader might want to compare this plan with the recent policy speech by Al Gore at New York University. Gore advocates a more aggressive approach to dealing with climate change.
“… we should start by immediately freezing CO2 emissions and then beginning sharp reductions. Merely engaging in high-minded debates about theoretical future reductions while continuing to steadily increase emissions represents a self-delusional and reckless approach. In some ways, that approach is worse than doing nothing at all, because it lulls the gullible into thinking that something is actually being done when in fact it is not.”
It is precisely this last concern that must be kept in mind when looking at this shiny new strategic plan. It is a necessary step but far from sufficient to solving the challenge that we face in climate change. And the resources that might be used to address the needs of this plan are being dissipated fighting a needless conflict in Iraq — jw
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