Did He or Didn't He? Get Something Right?

There seems to be a pretty good consensus in progressive minds that our Dear Leader has gotten just about everything in the field of Foreign Policy quite wrong. His SOTU proposals and ideas about his pet wars are being endlessly worked over in the blogosphere and elsewhere, while his remarks on the environment, global warming, and energy policy have gotten far less obvious play. What I have read has mostly tended to be negative, along the lines of "too little too late," as in this gathering of opinion in a recent posting on The Blue Marble (a new blog from Mother Jones, on the subject of The Environment and Health: President Bush: as Usual, Sending the Wrong Message on the Environment.

Argument is the intellectual spice of life, though, isn't it? And I have found an interesting take on the SOTU proposals on CAFE limits and ethanol additives in this piece by Gregg Easterbrook in Slate magazine online: What the President Got Right;Give Bush Credit for His Energy Proposal. Easterbrook is an interesting guy himself: a fellow of the Brookings Institution, a writer and commentor for ESPN, an editor at The New Republic and a former writer for the website Beliefnet. Though he began as an unbeliever in the reality of global climate change, he is smart enough to have allowed the evidence to officially change his mind, as can be seen in this aper he wrote for Brookings Institution Governance Studies,in June 06, Case Closed: The Debate About Global Warming Is Over. Easterbrook is paying attention, reading and writing extensively on the subjects of climate change and energy policy. So, when he says:

It's true that last week Bush did not endorse any mandatory restrictions on greenhouse gases, and the time for such restrictions has come. Many who reacted negatively to the Bush plan were really saying they were upset that Bush did not offer a plan to reduce the odds of artificial global warming. Yet Bush did offer the most important oil-use reduction proposal since 1975, and reducing petroleum consumption will cut greenhouse-gas emissions somewhat. Bush's energy critics seem to say that because he did not give them everything they wanted, any major concession he did offer must be deplored. But stricter federal mpg rules would lead to far-reaching changes in American oil-consumption curves and American automobile culture. Give Bush some credit!

I have to take heart and hope that he's right. Whatever small ray of environmental light can be seen at the end of this disastrous tunnel of an administration is cause for hope, and it's something we all desperately need. Please, read Easterbrook's piece, and leave a comment with your thoughts.

Tags: cafe standards, energy policy, gregg easterbrook, sotu

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