The setting was familiar--the rostrum backed by the massive green marble. So, too, the message.
President Bush was speaking to the U.N. General Assembly, giving his valedictory address. And in tenor and content, it could have been the introductory speech he delivered in a meeting delayed as New York, and the world, recovered from the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Delivering a message of preemption, Bush told the U.N. today:
But, if one sentence in his address--delivered with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran looking on--summarized Bush's message after eight years of occasionally rocky relations with the world body, it was this:
The United Nations and other multilateral organizations are needed more urgently than ever.
Was this the same President Bush, then, who made it clear in his 2002 address that the United States was headed toward a showdown with Saddam Hussein. And that while Washington would appreciate U.N. support, the mission would go forward regardless?
From his post in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, F. Chase Hutto III has had his hands in a variety of issues.
There was the debate over clean air and global warming. By all accounts, he helped scuttle the course favored by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency for stronger regulations intended to fight emissions of greenhouse gases, as Countdown to Crawford reported a month ago.
There was the time the administration was considering greater restrictions on smog-forming ozone; he opposed them. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration rule to protect North Atlantic right whales? The Bush administration is reportedly about to scale it back. Hutto was in deep on that one, too.
His role was tracked by the Washington Post, which reports today that the administration has a new job in mind for him: He will be promoted, the Post reports, from his staff position in Cheney's office to assistant secretary of energy.
The result: One of the most ardent opponents of government regulation within the government would be put in a key decision-making position where global warming policies are set.
Said Jason K. Burnett, who as a deputy associate administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency tangled with Hutto over global warming until leaving the government: "I can't think of a case where Chase advocated more environmental or health protections."
As for placing Hutto in the Energy Department at this late date, the Post, quoting Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists, notes: "In coming months, Hutto could make policy decisions that the next administration would find difficult to reverse quickly."
The Bush administration is proposing a major change in the way the federal government decides whether wildlife and plants deserve protection under the Endangered Species Act.
Critics say the move, which is subject to a 30-day comment period before it can be put into effect, would dramatically weaken what has long been seen as a crucial law saving plants, animals, birds and fish from extinction.
The Interior Department unveiled a plan under which independent scientific reviews, which for three decades have been required to determine the protection status of potentially endangered species, would be eliminated. Instead, individual federal agencies would determine whether protected species would be imperiled by agency projects.
The Washington Post noted that "under current law, agencies must subject any plans that potentially affect endangered animals and plants to an independent review by the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service.
The paper added:
Under the proposed new rules, dam and highway construction and other federal projects could proceed without delay if the agency in charge decides they would not harm vulnerable species.
It was the second time in recent months that the administration moved away from reliance on the views of government scientists to put more decision making in the hands of agencies run by political appointees.
In a key decision at the Environmental Protection Agency dealing with global warming, senior officials circumvented the recommendations of professional staff scientists and yielded to pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney's office to relax regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement the change in the way the Endangered Species Act is carried out represented "another in a continuing stream of proposals to repeal our landmark environmental laws through the back door."
Footnote: Within hours after the Associated Press reported the proposed shift, an environmental group, the Endangered Species Coalition, had used it as the basis for an e-mail fundraising appeal, saying the plan "abandons the nation's commitment to protect endangered species from global warming and fast-tracks oil and gas mining, logging and development regardless of the impacts to our nation's wildlife, fish and plants on the brink of extinction."
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo of bald eagle: James Gerstenzang / Los Angeles Times
Increased ethanol in U.S. gasoline has been blamed for a wide swath of global ills -- not the least of them global warming and escalating food prices. Efforts to lower the amount of ethanol blended into the fuel supply brought the conservative Republican governor of Texas, Rick Perry, and several environmental groups into the same camp as they tried to persuade the Bush administration's Environmental Protection Agency to relax the ethanol-to-gasoline ratio.
That effort came to naught today. The EPA announced that it would not lower the so-called Renewable Fuel Standard, despite concerns about emissions and food prices.
Perry, who succeeded President Bush as governor of Texas, had asked the environmental agency in April to waive a requirement that 9 million gallons of ethanol and other renewable fuels be blended into gasoline this year. He said that by putting increasing demands on the supply of corn, the mandate was pushing up the cost of food and animal feed.
He was responding to a requirement imposed last December by Congress in an effort to lower fuel costs and make the United States less dependent on foreign oil.
But EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson said this afternoon: "After reviewing the facts, it was clear this request did not meet the criteria in the law."
Perry had sought a 50% cut in the amount of ethanol to be blended into the gasoline supply.
The EPA said this couldn't be done in time to have an impact this year on corn, food or fuel prices.
Response to the decision fell along predictable lines:
The Environmental Working Group's director of government affairs, Sandra Schubert, called the mandate "misguided" and said it was "forcing farmers to plow up marginal land and wildlife habitat while increasing global warming and dumping toxic fertilizers and pesticides into our precious water sources."
"America should be focusing on viable clean energy solutions like conservation, solar and wind," she said.
The president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, Jim Greenwood, said the decision sent "a strong message that we must continue moving forward toward sustainable production of advanced biofuels" to cut dependence on important oil and to increase biofuel production from non-food sources.
His organization represents biotech companies, among others involved in expanding the use of biofuels.
While we're on the subject of global warming, when it comes to reducing the emission of greenhouse gases from industry -- meaning, for example, aluminum smelters, landfills, coal mines and large farms -- President Bush has put great stock in voluntary programs.
Not the way to go, according to the inspector general's office of Bush's own Environmental Protection Agency.
It is "unlikely" that voluntary programs would reduce more than 19% the greenhouse gas emissions that are projected for various industries in 2010, the inspector general said in a report on Bush's program.
"If EPA wishes to reduce GHG emissions beyond this point, it needs to consider additional policy options," the report said.
The study blamed the reluctance of industry to take part in a voluntary reduction program and unreliable data about claimed reductions for the failure of efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions from non-carbon sources such as motor vehicles and power plants.
Senate Republicans blocked a new effort to obtain Bush administration documents on global warming -- and did so today by doing nothing.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is already looking into whether higher-ups in the administration -- and perhaps someone in Vice President Dick Cheney's office -- tried to squelch a finding that global warming would harm the nation's welfare.
And the Bush administration has tried to turn aside the committee's efforts to subpoena the EPA administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, and another official as it tries to find out whether the Bush administration's refusal to let California implement a tailpipe emissions law was based on politics rather than on science and law.
Today, the Senate Environment Committee sought to subpoena EPA papers that Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who chairs the committee, said had concluded that "the welfare of the American people is endangered if steps are not taken to avoid the ravages of unchecked global warming." She read them under an agreement that blocks wider distribution.
According to excerpts the committee released, the December, 2007, EPA document said that in the agency's judgment, "the elevated, combined atmospheric concentrations of the six greenhouse gases are reasonably anticipated to endanger public welfare."
Why did Johnson conclude that the nation's welfare would be hurt? Because, the document states, the sea level will continue to rise, exacerbating "storm surge flooding and shoreline erosion; heat waves will be more intense and last longer, wildfires will worsen, and water resources will be strained."
Bottom line: More greenhouse gases will make life worse in the United States.
Boxer's effort to get broader access to the report, however, was turned aside. It takes two Republicans to join the majority Democrats to issue a subpoena.
None showed up.
Our colleague Richard Simon reports, however, that Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the committee, issued a press release calling Boxer's efforts "a political exercise that is intended to score more political points to help keep this issue of alleged administration interference alive in the press as long as possible."
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo: Sen. Barbara Boxer. Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images
A congressional investigation has produced new details on the degree to which senior Bush administration officials favored using the Clean Air Act to limit greenhouse gas emissions — until pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, ExxonMobil and others in the oil industry led the Bush administration to change course.
Among the findings of the congressional investigation: There was wide senior-level support at the EPA for concluding that greenhouse gases are a danger to the public and that the EPA should regulate emissions — from vehicles, power plants, refineries and other sources.
That would have been a dramatic shift in federal policy, and it would have given the EPA a powerful hand in trying to limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases widely blamed for causing global warming.
Among those supporting this view, the report said, were Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman and three senior White House officials: Deputy Chief of Staff Joel D. Kaplan; Susan E. Dudley, regulatory chief at the Office of Management and Budget; and James L. Connaughton, chief of the Council on Environmental Quality.
According to the House committee report, representatives of ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute and the National Petrochemicals and Refiners Assn. argued ...
In a "let's-do-the-math" look at Al Gore's proposal that the next president set the nation on course to produce every last bit of its electricity through "wind, sun and other Earth-friendly energy" within the decade, U.S. News & World Report's James Pethokoukis decided the plan was "almost unfathomably pricey."
It makes sense, he said, "only if you think that not doing so almost immediately would result in an uninhabitable planet."
Pethokoukis came up with this estimate for Gore's challenge: $5 trillion.
He reached that figure by playing out an estimate provided by Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens for a plan to generate 20% of America's electricity by harnessing the power of the wind and building the infrastructure to transmit the electricity: $1.2 trillion.
What does this have to do with a blog named "Countdown to Crawford?" Only this: The proposal is something for the current president to think about -- and get started on, if he chooses to accept the challenge in his final months in office.
And, if only 269 votes had shifted in Florida eight years ago from Bush to the man from a small town in Tennessee, the blog you may well have been reading would have been "Countdown to Carthage."
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was sharply critical of President Bush's global warming policy in an interview on ABC's "This Week" last Sunday. All you need to know is that he used the word "bogus" in talking about it.
But there were the president and governor this afternoon in Redding, Calif., reviewing the federal and state efforts to fight wildfires there and elsewhere in the state.
On the flight to California, deputy White House press secretary Scott Stanzel was asked about the relationship of the two Republicans.
His response:
Governor Schwarzenegger is a colorful and opinionated leader who is not shy about voicing his opinions, and we may have different approaches on issues of climate change. That's an issue where the President has really led through the major economies process. And we've had different opinions about how we address those issues, but here we're all coming together. There's Republicans and Democrats on this plane who are working together to make sure we address the needs of the people of California.
It was his final summit with the Group of 8, the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia as well as the United States. President Bush, the most senior member of the group, was attending his eighth summit, and for years he withstood pressure to take a firmer stand against global warming.
It was the topic on the minds of summit partners and demonstrators.
His final words to the likes of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."
That was the report from the British press, citing "senior sources" who said Bush made the private joke as he was about to leave Japan on Wednesday.
It stunned his partners, according to the Telegraph, which said:
He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.
The Independent offered this analysis: "His remarks were taken as a two-fingered salute from the president from Texas who is wedded to the oil industry." (Two-fingered? Yes, that's the V-for-victory sign, but in Britain it means something else, too, when the palm is turned inward.)
A White House spokesman responded to our inquiry: "I don't have anything on this for you."
— James Gerstenzang
Photo: Yuri Kochetkov / European Pressphoto Agency
James Gerstenzang and Johanna Neuman are reporters in The Times' Washington bureau. Between the two of them, they have covered the White House, diplomacy, military affairs, the environment, international economics, trade and Congress. They have both spent time in Crawford, Texas.
