No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Junior emits more hot air

For years, George Bush Junior has studiously ignored the climate change crisis, bleated that "further research" was needed before taking action and then slashed funds to prevent that research from taking place, allowed oil industry lobbyists to rewrite and falsify his own scientists' reports, and fired those scientists when they did their jobs too well. And of course he reneged on his campaign promise to ratify the Kyoto treaty.

Now he dimly realizes at some level in his vestigial reptilian brain that a lot of people are worried about global warming, and therefore some token gesture on the subject is required. But not anything of substance; heaven forbid that Big Oil's hundred billion a year profits should be reduced by even the slightest amount! If that happened, no-one's face would be safe from Cheney the Dick's shotgun.

In a speech in the Rose Garden, Bush will lay out a strategy rather than a specific proposal for curbing emissions, White House press secretary Dana Perino said Tuesday. She did not disclose details of his announcement and would not say whether the president would propose any kind of mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

Of course he won't. And nobody seems to have asked Dana Peroxide whether Junior consulted with any climate scientists in coming up with this "strategy", whatever the hell it is, but again the answer is: of course not. Dollars to donuts the "strategy" is another few billions in corporate welfare for the oil companies.

In his remarks, Perino said, Bush will articulate a "realistic intermediate goal" for the United States. Bush will emphasize the importance of offering incentives to promote technology as an effective way to reduce green house gas emissions, she said.

Let's translate from Bush-babble into English.

Realistic? Read: business as usual.

Incentives? Yup, more subsidies for Big Oil, just like I said.

Technology? Read: "clean coal", which is so dirty, a Prius running on fuel derived from it emits more pollutants than a Hummer running on regular gas. And read biofuels, a gigantic swindle which is destroying the last of the tropical rain forests, driving food prices through the roof throughout the third world, and which is so heavily dependent on intensive application of artificial fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides that it actually uses up more fossil fuels than it replaces, while releasing 17 to 420 times as much greenhouse gas as if you just burned fossil fuels. But biofuels are Junior's favored "solution" because it's another massive giveaway to the megacorporations.

But here's what really kills me:

"To us, having unelected bureaucrats regulating greenhouse gases, at the direction of unelected judges, is not the proper way to address the issue."

Of for the love of... since when is "unelected" a deadly insult? And what about an unelected pseudo-president who refuses to address the issue at all? Sheesh! No sane person wants elected bureaucrats. It's their friggin' job to regulate, and politicians should set policy and then get the hell out of the way and let the bureaucrats implement the damn policy. As for judges... oh, forget it. This is all so stupid it hurts my brain.

Let's face it, no rethug is able or willing do anything meaningful about climate collapse. We will have to wait for a Democratic president taking office next January, unless we can impeach the snivelling little chimp in the meantime.