Hard-working science reporter Chris Mooney points out that President Bush’s chief science advisor, John Marburger, is talking about climate change and the need to take action. Specifically, in a speech in Boulder, Colorado in February of this year, Marburger said:
There simply isn’t any way to do it. You have got to change things very dramatically. We have a very big job ahead of us. Every country is going to have to use new technology, either to remove the Co2 from emissions from hydrocarbon burning power plants or to use some other way, some alternate method, of energy generation. So, this is what we have got to do and I think that we should get on with it and not get hung up over the Kyoto Protocol.
On the other — right — hand, is the White House chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, James Connaughton, who claims ”We are still working on the issue of causation, the extent to which humans are a factor" in global warming. Connaughton’s council went on to rewrite an EPA paper on climate change to reflect this view, which is not the consensus in the scientific community — to put it politely.
Will we ever find out where the President and his administration stand on this issue? If the matter is left up to White Press corps, evidently not. In the presidential election last fall, exactly one question (to my knowledge) was asked on the subject of the President, and it was asked not by a reporter but an ordinary citizen in the townhall-style debate.
Kit Stolz 