|
Bush believes climate change is real; renewable energy key to future, aide says David Garman told an Anchorage audience the Kyoto Protocol on climate change is ‘an unratified and unratifiable treaty,’ a mess left by Clinton Allen Baker PNA Contributing Writer
Environmental alarmists say the global climate is changing because man is burning fossil fuels and creating “greenhouse gases.”
Well, it turns out the Bush administration agrees that the global climate is changing, and does want to do something about it, according to David Garman, assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy. Bush is being wrongly painted as opposed to issues that would aid the environment, he indicated. Former Murkowski aide Garman’s new post in the Energy Department comes after he spent more than 20 years working on energy policies in Senate staff positions, much of it as an aide to Sen. Frank Murkowski, where he served as chief of the senator’s staff. Garman told an Anchorage audience that the Kyoto Protocol on climate change that President Bush repudiated is “an unratified and unratifiable treaty,” a mess left by the Clinton administration that his successor is trying to clean up.
The administration is committed to reducing environmental impacts, Garman said.
“We can now set this treaty aside, and try to come up with something that really will work,” he said.
The audience was interesting in itself, as was Garman’s approach. His March 1 luncheon speech was sponsored by several groups with broadly different agendas: the Alaska World Affairs Council, the Resource Development Council, the Alaska Support Industry Alliance and Commonwealth North. Wants to replace fossil fuels Despite the oil industry presence, Garman chose to highlight his agency’s commitment to replacing fossil fuels as the dominant source of energy in the United States.
“One of the things I’m working on, and hope to bring to the marketplace, is a car that doesn’t need petroleum, and emits nothing more harmful that water vapor,” he said.
The administration, he said, is serious about addressing the issue of global climate change, even though it’s not clear yet whether man is causing or even influencing the change, he said.
“By rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, we’re not saying global climate change isn’t real,” he said. But he said the treaty itself was unworkable, partly because it rejected any limits on emissions from developing countries.
After going back over the series of international gatherings he attended that led up to the Kyoto agreement, Garman concluded that “these negotiations were as much about economic competitiveness as environmental issues.” China, he noted, is expected to be the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter by about 2015.
European countries breathed a sigh of relief when Bush torpedoed the Kyoto Protocol, Garman said, because they could blame the Americans, while realizing that their countries couldn’t meet the targets either. Dollar commitment up The Bush administration is being wrongly portrayed as supporting increased energy production at the expense of other measures, Garman said.
In a list of 105 recommendations from the administration, “a majority, 54, have to do with improving energy efficiency and greater reliance on renewable resources,” he said.
In his budget proposal, “the president commits $1.3 billion to this purpose, a 27 percent increase over last year,” Garman said, more than Congress has appropriated for energy efficiency since 1981.
Bush is supporting measures to help make wind energy more economical, provide tax credits for hybrid vehicles, and provide a tax credit up to $2,000 for solar energy. Congress hasn’t addressed those issues yet, Garman said.
Bush’s energy policy is a balanced approach that looks at renewable resources for the future, but recognizes the importance of domestic reserves such as ANWR to meet the nation’s energy needs in the meantime, Garman told the group.
The administration must be doing something right on the climate issue since it’s getting criticism from both sides, Garman said.
“There are people who think we aren’t doing enough on climate change, while others thing we’re doing too much,” he said.
| 