Blame themselves? You’re getting colder. Blame Canada? You’re getting (globally) warmer….
Below is another dispatch from the climate talks in Poland by CAP Senior Fellow Andrew Light, first printed in WonkRoom.
In one of the more surreal moments of this year’s UN climate change talks, Bush’s chief environmental adviser blamed Russia for the Bush administration’s climate change obstructionism.
The US negotiating team featuring James Connaughton, Paula Dobriansky, and Harlan Watson appeared Thursday evening for a press conference where they largely dodged a series of questions about the last eight years of inaction, obfuscation, and general mayhem. When asked by Fioney Harvey of The Financial Times: “If you look back over the course of the last few years, is there anything you would have done differently or is there anything you wished had happened but didn’t happen?” Connaughton, Bush’s chief environmental adviser, devised a mindbending response:
I wish first that Russia had made its mind up sooner as to whether it was going to join Kyoto or not. I think we lost a couple of years of work while that decision was being made. It almost didn’t matter which way they came out but we lost a couple years until it was decided whether Kyoto would go forward or not. As soon as it was decided that Kyoto would go forward then countries began to face up to the reality of what they needed to do at the national level to work toward meeting those commitments.
Except, of course, Bush didn’t “face up” to any such thing, instead waiting until this year to propose a global warming plan sufficient only in Bizarro World.
The packed crowd outside the press briefing room watching on monitors erupted in hoots and shouts audible inside. Connaughton soldiered on, continuing for over five minutes, in an excursus on eliminating tariffs for technology transfer, getting a common measure on carbon reduction, and other issues that any climate wonk would love. The high point was midway through in a plea for more cooperation:
Everyone has to come together on these things. It would have been nice. I’m just pleased we are where we are today in fact with a work program not just of negotiation but a work program of cooperative action. And I think that could be more aggressive and move faster.
Watson, who also has claimed to “understand the real world,” gave a much shorter, more existential, even zenlike answer: “I take the world as it is. My only regret is that I’m not twenty years younger, maybe a lot taller, and a lot more handsome.”
Indeed. Who wouldn’t have wanted that?
[I have the same exact regret -- that Watson isn't 20 years younger, since then President Bush would not have named the global warming denier/delayer and long-time conservative stooge (that's the nicest word I could think of) as Special Envoy to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the U.S. Department of State, a position that holds the rank of ambassador!]
Related Posts:
- Pew Center: Bush team at PoznaÅ„ doing “a very good job, actually, of representing US interests”
- Dispatch #1 From Poznań: The American Problem
- Youth report from Poznań: Taking Back Our Future
- Gore’s PoznaÅ„ speech is online: “We cannot negotiate with the facts.”
- If there’s no U.S. climate bill in 2009, would U.N. climate talks collapse in Copenhagen?
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Disgusting little worms…
Ideological idiocy trying to lay claim to a scientific foundation.
Evidently some leaders express their ‘love, respect and sense of duty’ based upon self-serving ideologically-biased idiocy; political convenience, economic expediency and cultural contrivances; and whatsoever is socially agreeable and religiously tolerable. For our children to follow such old, selfish leaders, ones who adamantly advocate and recklessly embrace a way of living that is unrealistic and soon to become patently unsustainable, could lead the children into grave danger, even in these early years of Century XXI.
For the sake of us all and for coming generations, I trust that both new, bold, more reality-oriented, better leadership and required change are in the offing.
The arrogant and greedy leadership so dominant in my not-so-great generation of elders, {the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us}, who religiously and relentlessly reject necessary change, these leaders need to be seen as unfortunate and objectionable by all of us as well as replaced. Rather than foolhardily resist needed change, new leaders could choose to help the children make change before resistance to change destroys that which all of us claim to be preserving.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 …
I read Watson’s Bio once. He isn’t stupid, and he has the technical background. How does he sleep at night? The Russians will do for now. Give them 4 years and the Karl Rove types will have the Fox News fans believing GW is Obama’s fault.
I think the Bush people have taken up full time residence in the Twilight Zone.
They’ve told their big lies so often that they actually believe what they’re saying.
Long time reader, first time (I think) poster.
Wow! It’s like Tom Lehrer “Satire died when they awarded Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize”. I am one of the editors of “Manchester Climate Fortnightly”, and we try to run a piece every issue about some amazing lie someone has told. We’ve got next issue’s quote now.
Thanks for your hard work- I don’t always agree with your analysis, but I always feel much smarter and better informed for having grappled with it…
Russia, Saudi Arabia and China are going to miss their erstwhile veto power in the U.S. cabinet.
They must never get it back.
I sometimes think these people believe they have Jedi powers and can do the “these are not the droids you are looking for” trick.
Reference: “Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President” written by Dr. Justin A. Frank, a psychoanalyst who has a lot to say about what is emotionally wrong with George W. Bush, Dr. Frank’s professional ideas on what happened to GWB to make GWB crazy. George W. Bush also has dislexia and ADHD which make him mentally disabled for the job of president.
But don’t get me going on that subject.
I’m not surprised by these truly ridiculous statements from the Bush negotiating team as they depart the international climate world. After a strategy of “destroy and burn” for the last 7 plus years it is amazing that there is still anything left in the tank of the international negotiations. It is running and needs some more gas (that hopefully a re-engaged US Administration can bring), but to blame the failure on anyone but themselves is completely ridiculous. Russia! Are you kidding Jim! That is quite possibly the dumbest excuse I’ve ever heard, especially since Russia dragged its feet thanks to the behind the scenes of this Administration.
And to add even more stupid statements to what the Bush team said in Poland they said something to the effect of “we have been very supportive of moving negotiations forward during the two weeks in Poland”. As I said to someone: only these guys could consider not blocking progress as helping with progress. The only thing they really accomplished in Poland was too not speak very much.
There is some momentum coming out of Poland (as I discussed here: http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/jschmidt/momentum_from_poland_climate_negotiations.html) despite the huge “charred earth” that the Bush team has left. We definitely need some replanting programs to repair the burnt landscape and thankfully we have a new leader in the US that can do just that.
On climate change obstructionism…….
This response is so predictable, so duplicitous, so pathetic, so immoral, so dunderheaded.
The current leadership appears to be saying that the environmental ‘strategy’ of delay and denial was as necessary and justifiable as invading Iraq in 2003.
Only a tale told by an idiot could match the one we are seeing played out on the world’s stage in this first decade of Century XXI.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
Stop it…Stop thinking this way!!!
This administration will be gone in one month…My daughters’ worlds may be in ten if WE don’t gather our wits and take ..
Mulling around the edges on the world already knows about the past, is not going to help US going forward.
PEBO has a viable strategy, if Congress doesn’t act, then i will take the power left me by my predessor to take action on my own throught executive orders and EPA (as empowered by the SC). Further i will name every Congressman and Senator who does not support this and put their names on humanity’s grave, if they do support my administration.
In the meantime, see you in DC in March. Chins up. We canot show our pessimism to the young. This is what leadership is about. I think we have the right man in the White House to try.