US experts and environmental activists on Tuesday slammed US President George W. Bush for threatening to veto a far-reaching climate change bill that is before the Senate for debate.
“We have had seven years of President Bush trying to mislead the country about the science of global warming and the urgency of taking action,” Dan Lashof, climate center director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told a news conference.
“Now he’s trying to mislead the country about the economics of taking action,” Lashof told reporters listening in to the tele-conference, called to mark the publication of a report on how building a green economy in the US would create jobs.
Bush warned on Monday that the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill, which calls for a “cap and trade” system to try to cut emissions in the US, “would impose roughly US$6 trillion of new costs on the American economy,” and threatened to veto it.
“Nay-sayers for taking action now on solving global warming keep pointing to solutions as being a cost to the economy. Nothing could be further from the truth,” Bracken Hendricks, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress think tank, told the news conference.
“It’s critical that all of us question the assumption that global warming is a cost when in fact it represents the future of the US economy,” Hendricks said.
The “cap and trade” system suggested in the climate change bill proposes that companies trade permits, giving them the right to emit a certain amount of pollution, “capped” below current emission levels.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on Monday that the climate change bill would have “a devastating impact on the US economy ... and result in massive job losses.”
But the report released on Tuesday pointed in the opposite direction.
“Millions of US workers will benefit from the project of defeating global warming and transforming the United States into a green economy,” it said.
The report highlights a “chance to revitalize this economy with green energy growth,” one of its authors, Bob Pollin, said.
Ignoring the economic opportunities inherent in building a green economy has cost the US its competitive edge and leadership role in developing technology, Hendricks said.
“We’ve seen solar manufacturing and markets taken up by Japan and Germany ... because the United States, which invented solar photovoltaic technology, has had a complete abdication of leadership in building this as a strategic industry,” Hendricks said.
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