Bush Climate Goals Greeted With Skepticism
By Eli Kintisch
ScienceNOW Daily News
1 June 2007
"Climate scientists are criticizing the greenhouse gas emissions goals announced yesterday by President George W. Bush. The Administration wants to establish country-by-country emissions goals by late 2008 but did not call for mandatory cuts."
The press release can be found HERE
He's getting ready for a summit in Heiligendamm next week. I suppose he needs to look good. He's taken too much time. At least one scientist say he has also been playing with statistics.
"Peter Gleick, an environmental scientist and president of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California, says the White House is "cherry-picking" the data to paint a more rosy picture. "It leaves the impression that the U.S.'s choice of climate policy does more to solve the problem than Europe's--but that's wrong," he says. Looking at all six greenhouse gases, and not just carbon dioxide, shows that the growth in European Union emissions between 2000 and 2004 exceeded U.S. growth in emissions by roughly 1%, he says. But any other period since 1990, he says, shows the United States with greater emissions. According a Pacific Institute analysis from 1990 to 2004, "U.S. greenhouse gas emissions grew more than 15% while emissions from the 15 countries of the European Union (the EU-15) declined by around 1%.""
The summary of the analysis by the Pacific Institute says:
Summary
"Throughout the first half of 2007, the White House has falsely claimed that the United States is doing better than Europe in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This claim was officially made by the White House on February 7 and has been repeated in various forms by White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, Council on Environmental Quality Chairman James Connaughton, and Science Advisor to the President John Marburger, most recently on May 31, 2007.
¹ The White House is misusing science and data to make this claim, as the Pacific Institute first pointed out on March 8.2 The White House can only back up this claim by looking at a single greenhouse gas over a narrow timeline. Looking at the full range of gases over a longer period, the conclusion reverses completely: the European Union is curbing greenhouse gas emissions more aggressively and successfully than the United States. Interestingly, the origin of this claim is not the White House at all, but appears to be the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which published a version of this claim in the Washington Times, five days before the White House began using it."Remember in my posting on Sunday May 20th, that
The CEI "is an ideologically-driven, well-funded front for corporations opposed to safety and environmental regulations that affect the way they do business. (Sourcewatch.org)" and that
"In response to an inquiry from the Guardian, Exxon announced that the company “stopped funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute this year.” (source, Media Transparency)
The Pacific Institute study goes on to say that " carefully selecting the measure to be reported to prove a point – in this case, choosing to look at carbon dioxide emissions rather than all greenhouse gas emissions. The second flaw is the result of reference period hunting, or cherry picking the time period used."²
From the period 1990 (Article 3 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change specifies that all greenhouse gas emissions analyses are to use 1990 as the base year )until today, Europe's emissions are not rising "twice as fast" as those of the US. Rather, taking just CO2 gas emissions into account, and " over the proper period from 1990 to 2004. U.S. carbon dioxide emissions grew almost 18% over that period, while EU-15 CO2 emissions grew 8.6%³"
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1
White House press briefing with Snow and Connaughton. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070531-17.html
² The Political and Selective Use of Data: Cherry-Picking Climate Information in the White House - Dr. Peter H. Gleick Pacific Institute Initial Version: March 8, 2007 Updated and Expanded: June 1, 2007 http://www.pacinst.org/topics/integrity_of_science/case_studies/selective_use_climate_update.pdf FONT color=#ffffff>page 3
³ Energy Information Administration International Energy Annual 2004 Table Posted: July 19, 2006 co2 World Carbon Dioxide Emissions from the Consumption and Flaring of Fossil Fuels, 1980-2004 http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tableh1co2.xls
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