Another Bushco Climate Crisis Co-Conspirator

This New York Times story tells us…

WASHINGTON — A new international ranking of environmental performance puts the United States at the bottom of the Group of 8 industrialized nations and 39th among the 149 countries on the list.

…

The United States, with a score of 81.0, he noted, “is slipping down,” both because of low scores on three different analyses of greenhouse gas emissions and a pervasive problem with smog. The country’s performance on a new indicator that measures regional smog, he said, “is at the bottom of the world right now.”

He added, “The U.S. continues to have a bottom-tier performance in greenhouse gas emissions.”

But not to worry; our government leapt into action immediately to communicate some truly outrageous lies for our media stenographers.

James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said the problem with ozone, which is formed by chemical reactions between oxides of nitrogen, volatile organic compounds and sunlight, was being addressed by the Bush administration in new rules to curb emissions of those chemicals from power plants and from the burning of diesel fuels.

“We recognized this about five years ago,” he said.

And assuming that’s true, you’re only acting on that now??!!

“We have a program that in the next 10 years is going to address this in a really big way,” with “more than a 90 percent cut” in diesel emissions from trucks and off-road engines like those in construction equipment.

The United States’ low ranking in measures like the amount of carbon dioxide emissions per capita or per unit of electricity — in the bottom 20 percent — is not surprising, Mr. Connaughton said, because the United States contributes a quarter of the new releases of greenhouse gas emissions.

In recent years, he added, the United States has improved its carbon intensity — the output of emissions relative to economic growth. In Europe and Japan, he said, “intensity is not improving as fast, but many of these countries started in a better place.”

I’m not going to waste my time trying to figure out what that means, though Connaughton could be referring to Switzerland’s emphasis on mass transit and hydroelectric power as noted in the story, which makes it “the most greenhouse gas efficient economy in the developed world” according to the ranking.

What I want to do instead is take a look at how Connaughton and his playmates worked to kill California’s plan to regulate greenhouse gases from vehicle emissions (here), as well as take note here of a report that our ruling cabal was due to hand over to the U.N. stating, in part, that…

The United States will emit about 20 percent more greenhouse gases by 2020 than it did in 2000, according to a draft report that the Bush administration was scheduled to submit to the United Nations a year ago.

Oh, and did I mention how Connaughton’s boss pulled his little bait and switch move on Germany’s Angela Merkel to try and cut the legs out from under her vehicle emissions reduction plan for her country (here)?

And Jim Hightower tells us the following about Connaughton (from here)…

"A former lobbyist for utilities, mining, chemical, and other industrial polluters, Connaughton, represented the likes of General Electric and ARCO in their effort to escape responsibility for cleaning up toxic Superfund sites. Now he heads up pollution-policy development for the administration and coordinates its implementation. He has led the charge to weaken the standards of getting arsenic out of our drinking water, and he has steadily advised Bush to ignore, divert, stall, dismiss, and otherwise block out all calls for action against the industrial causes of global warming," (Hightower) wrote in Utne.com.[2]

It would be nice if this otherwise satisfactory news story provided this information, but I guess The Old Gray Lady is lost in her own figurative fog, as opposed to the literal one that is slowly choking our planet thanks in large part to Dubya and his minions.