Appearing on the NBC Today Show, First Lady Laura Bush was asked whether it was a fair criticism to say President Bush is “late coming to the table” on global warming. She responded, “Well, I wouldn’t say — I mean, no, not at all. I don’t think that’s fair criticism.” Watch it:
President Bush hasn’t simply been late in coming to the table — in fact, he hasn’t yet arrived.
Prior to today, the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was released in 2001, the same year President Bush entered office. It cited “new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities,” and predicted ominous ramifications, including “physical damage,” “population displacement,” “adverse effects on food production, freshwater availability and quality,” and increased risk of “infectious disease epidemics, particularly in developing countries.”
In 2001, and for five subsequent years, President Bush failed to utter a single word about this global crisis in his annual State of the Union address. Instead, he has repeatedly ignored the science and questioned whether humans are contributing to global warming.
The IPCC’s findings released today confirm the results from 2001: “Human-caused global warming is here, visible in the air, water and melting ice, and is destined to get much worse in the future.”
Full transcript:
VIEIRA: I want to move on, Mrs. Bush, to a red, hot-button issue: global warming. There is a report — long-awaited report — out this morning that says the problem is virtually man-made and it’s going to get worse.
Your husband recently acknowledged the link between the two, but there are a lot of critics who think that he was late coming to the table on this issue. Is that a fair criticism?
BUSH: Well, I wouldn’t say — I mean, no, not at all. I don’t think that’s fair criticism.
Last year in his State of the Union address, as you know, he said we were addicted to fossil fuels, addicted to oil in our country; and this year he set very specific and ambitious goals to reduce our use of fossil fuels and, so, reduce the amount of carbon and the gases in the air.
VIEIRA: Is it an essential issue to you?
BUSH: It is an essential issue. Obviously, the environment has to be an essential issue to everybody. And it is to our government, as well. We’re spending billions of dollars in the government on research on ways to be able to have cleaner energy and, so, have a cleaner environment.
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