On March 13th, President George W. Bush announced his decision to reverse a campaign pledge to seek mandatory reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel-burning power plants. This carbon dioxide is one of the principle causes of global warming, which most scientists predict will result in catastrophic climate change and coastal flooding across the globe. The administration's EPA chief, Christine Todd Whitman, was blindsided by the Bush announcement, having just told a meeting of the G-8 environmental ministers that the U.S. was committed to the goals of the 1997 Kyoto accords.

Bush said he backed away from his campaign promise to place a cap on greenhouse gases because regulation would increase energy prices and hurt consumers. But news reports indicate that a full-tilt lobbying campaign by energy and electric utility companies, which had collectively contributed millions of dollars to the Bush presidential campaign, was the deciding factor in the White House policy flip flop.

Between The Lines' Scott Harris spoke with Kert Davies, director of Greenpeace USA's Global Warming Campaign, who takes a critical look at the Bush policy reversal on carbon dioxide and what this may mean to future international global climate change agreements.

Kert Davies:
It's clear that the Bush team is beholden to the interests we already knew they are connected to -- that is the oil and coal industry, generally. These are the folks that funded the campaign and put them in office. Bush, after all, had his own oil company at one point. He comes from a family involved in oil; Cheney as well. Those interests have no interests in regulations on fossil fuels. There's a group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute that is funded by Exxon, amongst others here in Washington D.C. There's another group called the Greening Earth Society which is totally funded by coal industry money and their premise is that global warming isn't bad for us, "it's going to make the world a green place and by the way, it doesn't exist either." So they have a double-ended strategy there.

Those groups were bragging up and down (about their victory on stopping CO2 regulations). We somehow got their emails and they had a clear strategy to isolate EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman -- got her on CNN's Crossfire to say that Bush supported the Kyoto protocol. They then turned that around in Congress and enlisted some very right-wing Congressmen who wrote Bush a letter basically saying "That's not what you meant, did you sir?" and he turned around and said "No, indeed, I opposed the Kyoto protocol and I will not regulate carbon dioxide," in an about-face from his campaign promise that he would regulate pollution from power plants including carbon dioxide.

Between The Lines:
In his policy reversal, Bush questioned the science behind global warming, characterizing it as "incomplete." Please describe for us the scientific evidence that backs up predictions of coastal flooding and catastrophic climate change if greenhouse gases remain unregulated.

Kert Davies:
There's no doubt on the science of global warming. The few people who are still skeptical -- aside from Bush -- are scientists who are paid by the fossil fuel industry. I'm not making that up, it's clearly documented. The evidence ranges from satellite measurements of the atmosphere, temperature records on the earth, borings in the ice shields of the North and South poles, measuring tree rings, and the record of changes in coral reefs'. There are numerous static records of the climate past that point to a dramatic increase in temperature and CO2 in the latter half of the 20th century. Throughout the fossil record, smaller increases in CO2 have tracked perfectly with temperature increases. Now we have a record going back at least 50 years of direct measurements of CO2. Longer measurements in things like ice bubbles that have been recovered or older scientific instruments that are reopened where you can get a sample of former atmosphere. Basically, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was relatively static for thousands of years and it's just taken a spike in recent times. It's unbelievable if you see the graph -- nothing curves upward like that in nature.

So it's happening. There's no doubt that it's happening. The biggest question now is, what's it going to do, how's it going to hit us, how hard, where and who's going to be affected. What ecosystems, what weather systems, and global circulation systems? But all that is developing at a rapid pace on the scientific front. There's modeling that shows that the Gulf Stream could alter course. There are major circulations in the North Atlantic that could twist around. If those things change, the weather of the entire planet changes.

Between The Lines:
As I understand it, the U.S. produces about 25 percent of all the earth's greenhouse gases. What effect will the Bush administration position on CO2 have on international agreements such as the Kyoto protocol?

Kert Davies: It's kind of depressing at this point. The world watches the U.S. on this very carefully, and where the U.S. goes the world will go. That can lead to a positive solution or down the tubes, frankly.

If the U.S. refuses to go forward with good faith negotiations, it won't be good for the climate convention. We have to relate to global warming as a problem we need to catch; that's the whole dilemma. We caught it maybe 20 years too late to effectively head it off. In other words, we can't stop global warming at this point. Something is happening and it's going to continue into the future. We've got to head off catastrophic global warming at this point and try to figure out how to deal with the impact.