Clinton talks, the U.S. walks ... .

[comrade33]

i’ve read most of this thread (sorry, i know how annoying it is when someone posts something that has already been said because they haven’t read the whole thread) and i didn’t notice anybody mentioning that the reason the US creates so much pollution is because of consumers like you and i. i think its wrong to put al this blame upon one person (bush, although i think he should have signed the treaty) when it is americans, like me and some of you, that have created and furthered this gas guzzling, energy sucking culture. you seem to be talking about all of this as if it is caused by faceless politics and corpratism. it isn’t.

[RTFirefly]

@John Mace

Yeah, I guess that’s why the Senate passed Bush’s proposals on Social Security reform and Immigration Reform. Sorry, but that argument just doesn’t cut it.

The Senate majority (which was what I referred to) supported Bush’s Social Security “reform”. But they didn’t want to actually take the heat of voting for it without some Dems along for the ride as political cover.

Immigration reform? That’s what Bush is pushing NOW - post-Katrina and post-Miers. (He may have said some nice words about it before, but without any push behind it.)

Besides, the Senate vote in 1997 was 95-0. That’s exactly ZERO Senators who would have agreed to Kyoto. ZERO.

(1) it ain’t 1997 anymore; even by 2001 you had a lot more people believing that we needed to actually DO something about global warming than in 1997. (2) I wasn’t talking about Kyoto; I was talking about that sensible alternative to the ‘deeply flawed’ Kyoto treaty that you guys say shouldn’t be that much trouble to come up with. (3) You get ten GOP votes for that alternative proposal as political cover for the Dems, and all but a few of them will be there. (4) Pre-Katrina, Bush could have gotten that many GOP Senate votes for the sun rising in the west.

If you’ve got evidence that the Senate has changed its position relative to 1997, let’s see it. And you keep forgetting that not one Senate Democrat endorsed Kyoto when Clinton was president.

With respect to global warming, the country’s come a long way since 1997; any reasonably large group of pols can be expected to move with public sentiment.

We’re just going to have to agree to disagree on this. You simply refuset to acknowledge Bush’s plan-- that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have one.

I’d characterize our disagreement differently. How Kyoto works is that the signatories negotiate the targets the individual countries must meet; the individual countries must then come up with their own mechanisms to meet their treaty obligations.

Bush has neither proposed an alternative system of targets, nor a set of mechanisms by which the US would meet what its target might be under some hypothetical reasonable alternative to Kyoto.

In short, he’s doing nothing.

How many Senate Democrats were on Clinton’s side again? Let me answer for you: ZERO.

Hint: it’s not 1997 anymore.

In 2000, both major Presidential candidates claimed to agree that global warming was a problem we needed to address. Can you say “political cover”? Apparently not, but what the fuck.

[Squink]

@RTFirefly

In 2000, both major Presidential candidates claimed to agree that global warming was a problem we needed to address.

Bush’s CO2 flip-flop was one of his first broken promises. The cover offered at the time sounds a little ironic now, given all the unacknowledged mistakes since then:

CHRIS HORNER: Well, I think it’s very significant that we have an administration and particularly a president who can admit when they made a mistake. And that was clear. This was not a decision that was fully vetted.

[John_Mace]

@RTFirefly

The Senate majority (which was what I referred to) supported Bush’s Social Security “reform”. But they didn’t want to actually take the heat of voting for it without some Dems along for the ride as political cover.

I don’t think so, but if you’ve got a cite to prove it, I’m all ears (or eyes). And even if they won’t support it for political reasons, what difference does that make? You’re original statement is still wrong.

Immigration reform? That’s what Bush is pushing NOW - post-Katrina and post-Miers. (He may have said some nice words about it before, but without any push behind it.)

Nope. Bush started pushing this 2 years ago, and it went nowhere. Note the date on this GD thread, started by yours truly: Debate Bush’s latest Immigration reform plan.

(1) it ain’t 1997 anymore; even by 2001 you had a lot more people believing that we needed to actually DO something about global warming than in 1997. (2) I wasn’t talking about Kyoto; I was talking about that sensible alternative to the ‘deeply flawed’ Kyoto treaty that you guys say shouldn’t be that much trouble to come up with. (3) You get ten GOP votes for that alternative proposal as political cover for the Dems, and all but a few of them will be there. (4) Pre-Katrina, Bush could have gotten that many GOP Senate votes for the sun rising in the west.

Now I’m completely confused. This is exactly what Bush is doing (trying to negotiate an alternative to Kyoto), and what you’re giving him grief for.

With respect to global warming, the country’s come a long way since 1997; any reasonably large group of pols can be expected to move with public sentiment.

I’d characterize our disagreement differently. How Kyoto works is that the signatories negotiate the targets the individual countries must meet; the individual countries must then come up with their own mechanisms to meet their treaty obligations.

Bush has neither proposed an alternative system of targets, nor a set of mechanisms by which the US would meet what its target might be under some hypothetical reasonable alternative to Kyoto.

Um, yes he has. You just refuse to recognize them. Or, are you just categorizing his recomendations as “unreasonable”? If that’s the case, then then you’ve moved the goal posts from your original claim that he hasn’t made any alternative proposals. From the WH site, here’s the metric and the target:

Reduce the Greenhouse Gas Intensity of the U.S. Economy by 18 Percent in the Next Ten Years.

[ElvisL1ves]

We saw that approach in his recent Iraq Victory Strategy speech, too. Note the utter lack of a proposed, committed way to get from A to B in either one, only definitions of A and B and ways to measure how we know we’re at B.

It’s called “lip service”, in this case to the pro-environmental-protection majority, while tactitly assuring the GOP’s corporate contributor base that they won’t have to actually do anything about it.

I hadn’t thought you were one to be so easily fooled into confusing goals and metrics with actual plans, to say nothing of actual commitment to carrying out those plans. At least you’re not alone; take what comfort you can in that.

To summarize it for you:
Step 1: Declare war
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Success!

[RTFirefly]

@John Mace

I don’t think so, but if you’ve got a cite to prove it, I’m all ears (or eyes). And even if they won’t support it for political reasons, what difference does that make? You’re original statement is still wrong.

Looks like we’ve got my opinion against yours. You made the original assertion. Your ball.

Nope. Bush started pushing this 2 years ago, and it went nowhere. Note the date on this GD thread, started by yours truly: Debate Bush’s latest Immigration reform plan.

Maybe you don’t understand the difference between proposing a plan, and pushing it. Bush pushed his Social Security deform plan, for instance - you can see that he did a great deal to try to rally support for it. But if there’s any evidence that he did more than propose immigration legislation, then let it kinda lie there without pushing on Congress to act on it or going around the country to rally support for it, I missed it.

Now I’m completely confused. This is exactly what Bush is doing (trying to negotiate an alternative to Kyoto), and what you’re giving him grief for.

I’m equally confused. The first step of negotiation is to put a proposal on the table. So what’s on the table? “I don’t like that India and China aren’t asked to do anything.” OK, what should Kyoto-prime ask of India and China, according to Bush?

Um, yes he has. You just refuse to recognize them. Or, are you just categorizing his recomendations as “unreasonable”? If that’s the case, then then you’ve moved the goal posts from your original claim that he hasn’t made any alternative proposals. From the WH site, here’s the metric and the target:

Didn’t you read my last post? Kyoto provides metrics and targets; the countries come up with plans to meet them. If Bush is proposing an alternative to the Kyoto Treaty, then why does this refer just to the U.S.? What would he require of India and China, if that’s his hangup?

Or if it’s a plan that would cause us to meet what Bush feels our goals should be under Kyoto-prime, where’s the plan?

If you’re arguing that a metric and a target (but no plan) for the U.S. alone constitutes a legitimate alternative either to Kyoto or to US participation in Kyoto, then that’s beyond argument. An alternative to the treaty would propose targets under that metric for all countries, not just us. And an alternative to participation would do something analogous to what US participation would do: produce a concrete plan to meet the instead-of-treaty targets.

But here, we’re just negotiating a target with ourselves, with no obligation to meet the target, and no plan to get us there. That’s not an alternative, any more than it’s a car if I nail together a bunch of scrap lumber in the shape of a car body. There ain’t nothing to make it run. It isn’t that it doesn’t run the way I want, or that it doesn’t get the sort of power or gas mileage I would like. It isn’t even that it’s got an engine that needs to be rebuilt. It doesn’t have one in the first place. It isn’t built in a way that will make it run. It’s not a real car.

What makes Kyoto run is that it’s a treaty, and nations are expected to honor the treaties they sign. What would make a US-only plan run is for there to actually be some laws that would demand changes in domestic carbon emissions. But this ‘alternative’ has no engine. It will not run. It’s not a real alternative to Kyoto.

[John_Mace]

@RTFirefly

Looks like we’ve got my opinion against yours. You made the original assertion. Your ball.

Not so fast, there, buckaroo. You made the original assertion that:

@RTF

IUp until Harriet Miers, how often had the Senate majority resisted Bush? Never, IIRC. Bush has had a clear field for all these years.

I cited Social Security. Your claim that Senate Republican resisted for political reasons (rather than policy reasons) is moot. It doesn’t matter **why **they resisted-- they resisted. Remember, that assertion was brought up in defense of the idea that Bush could push the Kyoto treaty thru Congress if he really wanted to. That’s laughable on the face of it.

I don’t see any point in conitnuing this debate, as everytime I refute your arguments, you simply move the goalposts. I’m not into playing that game.

[RTFirefly]

@John Mace

Not so fast, there, buckaroo. You made the original assertion that:

@RTFirefly

Up until Harriet Miers, how often had the Senate majority resisted Bush? Never, IIRC. Bush has had a clear field for all these years.

I cited Social Security. Your claim that Senate Republican resisted for political reasons (rather than policy reasons) is moot. It doesn’t matter **why **they resisted-- they resisted.

Please cite evidence of their resistance to Bush’s Social Security plan. Other than the fact it didn’t come to a vote - by all indications the White House’s choice - I can only find a few quotes by a handful of the more moderate GOP Senators that they were less than fully supportive of Bush’s Social Security plan. That’s a pretty weak definition of ‘resistance’ by the GOP majority: a handful of members of that majority expressing qualified doubts.

Remember, that assertion was brought up in defense of the idea that Bush could push the Kyoto treaty thru Congress if he really wanted to. That’s laughable on the face of it.

Of course it’s laughable. It also wasn’t my assertion. This is not the first time you’ve claimed that I’ve said that, but I haven’t, and I’m getting tired of it.

I don’t see any point in conitnuing this debate, as everytime I refute your arguments, you simply move the goalposts. I’m not into playing that game.

I see no point in it either, especially since there aren’t any goalposts I’ve moved. I’ve said the same thing throughout: Bush’s ‘alternative’ is not in fact an alternative to either the international treaty, or the role of a signatory to that treaty. He has had a clear field during the entirety of his Administration, at least through August of 2005, to have Congress pass such an alternative - NOT the ‘deeply flawed’ Kyoto agreement itself, but an alternative with those flaws ‘fixed.’

If you disagree with me, fine. But don’t say I’ve said one thing at one point, and a different thing at another point. That’s bullshit.

[RTFirefly]

And tangential to this discussion, but related, here’s an update on one measure of the effects of global warming, from that radical lefty paper, the Wall Street Journal:

It may be the latest evidence of global warming: Polar bears are drowning.

Scientists for the first time have documented multiple deaths of polar bears off Alaska, where they likely drowned after swimming long distances in the ocean amid the melting of the Arctic ice shelf. The bears spend most of their time hunting and raising their young on ice floes.

In a quarter-century of aerial surveys of the Alaskan coastline before 2004, researchers from the U.S. Minerals Management Service said they typically spotted a lone polar bear swimming in the ocean far from ice about once every two years. Polar-bear drownings were so rare that they have never been documented in the surveys.

But in September 2004, when the polar ice cap had retreated a record 160 miles north of the northern coast of Alaska, researchers counted 10 polar bears swimming as far as 60 miles offshore. Polar bears can swim long distances but have evolved to mainly swim between sheets of ice, scientists say.

The researchers returned to the vicinity a few days after a fierce storm and found four dead bears floating in the water. “Extrapolation of survey data suggests that on the order of 40 bears may have been swimming and that many of those probably drowned as a result of rough seas caused by high winds,” the researchers say in a report set to be released today.

And further down:

Previous studies by the U.S. and Canadian governments support a link between the decline in sea ice in the Arctic and the ways polar bears try to adapt to their surroundings. For example, researchers say polar bears in the Beaufort Sea off Alaska and Canada used to spend most of their lives jumping from ice floe to ice floe in pursuit of seals. Only pregnant bears would occasionally wander onto the mainland, in search of a den.

But weekly aerial surveys by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service show that, over the past five years, an unusually large number of bears have congregated along the beaches. Between the coastal town of Barrow, Alaska and the Canadian border, about 300 miles east, researchers counted as many as 200 bears on land, said Scott Schliebe, director of the Fish and Wildlife’s polar-bear project. Many bears could be seen gathered around whale carcasses near villages like Kaktovik, which lies in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge where the Bush administration is pushing for drilling.

Scientists measured the distances from where the bears were gathered to the nearest ice sheets at sea and found this correlation: The farther the ice was from shore, the larger the number of bears were found on land.

Not exactly a surprising correlation.