Short answer: Nothing. Actually, that’s not fair: Less than nothing. The Department of Energy predicts that, if nothing were done to restrict greenhouse gas emissions, the U.S. would produce just under 9 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year by 2020. The Administration claims that if nothing were done, emissions in that year would be closer to 10 billion tons. With Bush’s all-voluntary restrictions, emissions will be exactly what the DOE says they would be, anyway. Addressing Bush’s plan, David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council told the New York Times, “If you set the hurdle one inch above the ground, you can’t fail to clear it.” But the better metaphor is digging a one inch trench then setting the hurdle an inch above the ground.
The estimates come from the draft of the United States Climate Action Report, a final version of which was promised for the summer of 2005. Explaining the delay, officials blamed “the recent departures of several senior staff members running the administration’s climate research program.” (Don’t you wonder why they’d quit?) The officials also said “no replacements had been named.” Survival of the species on the line and the Bush administration is too busy firing nonpartisan U.S. attorneys to staff the climate research program.
