President Bush Does Global Warming Talks His Way

The United Nations held a huge climate change convention Monday, with more heads of state and top-level officials gathered together at one time than ever before. Then former President Bill Clinton focused the Clinton Global Initiative on global warming solutions, focusing on the ways private industry -- like Wal-Mart -- could capitalize on doing good by the climate.

President Bush skipped those sessions, with the exception of a dinner with other heads of state, but he's holding his own talks today in Washington with the world's top polluters. His conference will have only 16 participants -- versus the U.N.'s 150 -- but those 16 are the heavy hitters whose emissions of greenhouse gas emissions lead all other nations. The big question is whether the multiple conferences and whatever agreements come out of them act cumulatively or not.

The suspicion is -- based on past performance -- Bush's goal is to subvert the hard targets for pollution reduction favored by the U.N. in favor of voluntary "aspirational goals." "President Bush's approach is the wrong way to fight global warming," Friends of the Earth-U.S. President Brent Blackwelder said in a statement made available to the press. "His approach is all talk and no action -- and the result is a go-it-alone strategy that isolates the U.S. on the world stage and leads to inaction while the global warming problem gets worse."

"Instead of getting serious about reducing U.S. emissions, he proposes a voluntary approach that will lead to global warming catastrophe. Rather than joining the rest of the world and doing all he can to support the United Nations framework, he proposes separate meetings to sidetrack the U.N. process." To think positively about the conference, because the major polluters are sitting down together, there's the potential for a real breakthrough.

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