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Bush to make climate announcement

President Bush is giving a Rose Garden speech on Wednesday on climate change to lay out the way he thinks the U.S. can reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Bush Navy Football
President Bush will make an address in the Rose Garden Wednesday, where he's expected to lay out the way he thinks the U.S. can reduce greenhouse gas emissions.Gerald Herbert / AP
/ Source: The Associated Press

President Bush plans to outline on Wednesday the way he thinks the United States can stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions and issue a challenge to lawmakers on climate change legislation.

In a Rose Garden speech, Bush will lay out a strategy rather than a specific proposal for "long-term" and "realistic" goals for curbing emissions, White House press secretary Dana Perino said Tuesday.

She did not disclose details of his announcement and would not say whether the president would propose any kind of mandatory cap on greenhouse gases.

Bush wants every major economy, including fast-growing nations like China and India, to establish a national goal for cutting the emissions believed responsible for global warming. In his remarks, Perino said, Bush will "articulate a realistic, intermediate goal" for the United States.

The speech will precede a meeting Thursday and Friday in Paris of the world's largest carbon polluters. Representatives from more than a dozen countries are expected to attend the meeting, the third in a series of talks that Bush organized last year.

A new global warming pact is being crafted to succeed the first phase of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. It requires 37 industrialized nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States is the only industrialized nation not to have ratified Kyoto, but it agreed with nearly 200 other nations at a conference in Bali in December to negotiate a new agreement by the end of 2009.

The White House search for a new climate initiative comes amid growing indication that mandatory action to address global warming is highly likely, if not now, in the next year or so. At the same time, the administration is facing growing pressure to regulate carbon dioxide under the federal clean air law.

The Environmental Protection Agency has been told by the Supreme Court that carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas, is a pollutant and must be regulated if the EPA determines it is a danger to health and welfare.

At the same time, the Interior Department is under pressure to give polar bears special protection under the Endangered Species Act because of disappearing Arctic sea ice. A lawsuit has been filed under the same law for more protection for arctic seals.

Together these cases would pull the enforcement of the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act into the debate over climate change.

"Recent court decisions hold the very real prospect that the federal government will regulate greenhouse gas emissions with or without a new law being passed," she said. "To us, having unelected bureaucrats regulating greenhouse gases, at the direction of unelected judges, is not the proper way to address the issue."

Bush also is to talk about his concerns with legislative proposals likely to be considered during Senate debate in June. Perino called the legislative proposals "unrealistic" and said they would have a negative impact on the U.S. economy.

"We believe there's a right way and a wrong way to address this problem," Perino said, adding that there is no legislative proposal on Capitol Hill that the administration supports.