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Advisers tell Bush climate plan is useless
Strategy 'lacks vision, goals, timetable and criteria'
Oliver Burkeman in Washington
Wednesday February 26 2003
The Guardian


George Bush's strategy on global warming suffered a setback yesterday
when a panel of scientists convened at the request of the White House
condemned it as lacking vision, and wasting time and money on research
questions that were resolved years ago.

Mr Bush's plan, introduced after the US backed out of the Kyoto
protocol, replaces that treaty's call for mandatory limits on greenhouse
gas emissions with a decade-long programme of research to determine the
scale of the problem.

But the 17 environmental experts, assembled by the National Academy of
Sciences at the president's request, said in their report that the
president's strategy "lacks most of the basic elements of a strategic
plan: a guiding vision, executable goals, clear timetables and criteria
for measuring progress", and misses the opportunity to cooperate more
with other countries on research.

"I've been doing ecosystems science for 30 years, and we know what we
know and what we don't know," William Schlesinger, a panel member, told
the Guardian. "Rather than focusing on the things we don't know, it's
almost as if parts of the plan were written by people who are totally
unfamiliar with where ecosystems science is coming from.

"They say we ought to be monitoring methane in remote regions," said Dr
Schlesinger, the dean of Duke University's Nicholas School of the
Environment and Earth Sciences in Durham, North Carolina. "Well, we've
been monitoring some of these things for 30 years, and there's no
question that the levels are rising."

The Bush plan also urges, for example, more research on how carbon
emissions are affected by forest fires, a question largely seen as
resolved within the academy.

"They didn't set the hard priorities," said Michael Prather, an earth
scientist from the University of California at Irvine and a panel
member. "From the scientists' point of view, we have a pretty good idea
of what is happening."

The experts also call for "greatly increased" spending on addressing
climate change, far above the $1.7bn per year earmarked. They concede
that the plan is "a solid foundation", going further towards formulating
a strategy on global warming research - as required by a 1990 act of
Congress - than either the first President Bush or Bill Clinton.

James Mahoney, director of the government's climate change science
programme, which is charged with executing the plan, said he welcomed
the panel's criticisms. "Nobody ever undertook to do something like this
before. There are certainly areas where we need to improve," he said.
"But we're in a process where we pushed to very quickly turn around a
battleship, and we've never had a plan before."

But the scientists' findings may cause concern in the administration in
the few weeks of the consultation period that remain, not least because
the panel included experts from corporations including BP and Honeywell.


Mr Bush has been accused of claiming that more research is needed in
order to stall moves towards limiting US greenhouse gas emissions.
Environmental groups accuse the oil company Exxon Mobil of leading a
campaign in the US to discredit scientific findings suggesting that the
dangers of global warming are grave.

"There's no question that if you claim that not much is known, even if
it is, then you delay the time at which you can say, OK, the research is
unequivocal and we need to do something about the problem," Dr
Schlesinger said. "It's not very far beneath the surface that there's an
element of not taking any action here."