The release today of the first climate report from Barack Obama’s presidency prompted a dizzy reaction in the press. The AP called it “the strongest language on climate change ever to come out of the White House” and the Washington Post pointed out that it called evidence of climate change “unequivocal.” Unveiled by Obama’s scientific advisor and packaged by a San Francisco-based environmental PR firm, the report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, helped convey the idea that Obama was breaking from the Bush years to tackle climate change head-on. Nevermind that almost nothing of substance in the report is different from a draft that the Bush administration had released last summer.
Take this line from the executive summary, which so impressed the Post: “Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced.” Here’s what the the Bush administration’s draft said: “Global warming is unequivocal and is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases and other pollutants.” Not much difference there.
Aside from the natural gap in polish between a rough and final draft, very little seperates the two documents. The Bush version prominently states that the impacts of human-induced climate change “are apparent now throughout the United States,” that “climate changes are occurring faster that projected,” and that reducing climate change will entail “reducing emissions to limit future warming.” It’s as if the report had been written by Al Gore.
Of course, Bush didn’t want to release this report. The first draft, made public last summer, was published four years late and only after an environmental group successfully sued for its release. Yet that doesn’t make Obama’s decision to hype the final version any more impressive. It comes at no political cost to him but could be seen as a way to placate environmentalists. Many green groups are on the verge of mutiny or have declared it over the Waxman/Markey climate bill, an unconscionable giveaway to big polluters, in their view, that Obama has called “a historic leap.” Those groups won’t be impressed by today’s news, but some of their supporters will.
