Bush Takes a Backseat

By John Kerry

Americans are an optimistic people, especially when it comes to protecting our environment and public health. Our nation has made extraordinary environmental progress over the past 30 years, which helped, not hurt our economy. Americans Americans are an optimistic people--especially when it comes to protecting our environment and public health. Our nation has made extraordinary environmental progress over the past 30 years, which helped, not hurt our economy. Americans believe renewed leadership and technological innovation can once again protect our air and water and create a strong economy for all our citizens.

That same optimism and common sense is in short supply in our politics today. The Bush Administration has succeeded in "changing the tone" back to the days of pessimism, when partisan politics pitted businesses against clean air and water. It has turned the environmental agenda over to big polluters, denouncing even modest reforms as technologically impossible and economically ruinous. These doomsday predictions aren't new: if Richard Nixon had believed polluters' grim fairy tales, he never would have put an end to the days when lakes and rivers literally caught fire.

Nowhere is presidential leadership more lacking than in the debate over global warming. It took the Bush Administration 16 months to acknowledge what scientists have known for more than a decade: the same pollution--primarily from fossil fuels--that causes asthma and respiratory illness is also altering and warming the atmosphere. Refusing to address climate change may bring unprecedented environmental damage to the health and well-being of people throughout the world.

Yet the Bush Administration continues to embrace a policy--at home and around the world--of pure inaction at best. In a stroke of unilateralism the White House announced it wouldn't even try to fix a decade- in-the-making international agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, to address global warming. That position abandons the work of 160 nations begun with the approval of President Bush's father.

The White House and the auto industry teamed up to defeat Senator John McCain and me when we tried to modestly improve car and truck efficiency while cutting pollution and reducing our dependency on foreign oil from nations that support terrorism.

Americans deserve better choices than this Administration is offering. To begin, the U.S. must stop being an environmental isolationist and again work with our global allies. We should re-engage now, so we are the masters of our own destiny.

First and foremost, we must lead at home, where Americans' unrivaled ability to drive economic growth through innovation can protect the environment and create jobs. Why not set a national goal of having 20% of our electricity come from domestic alternative and renewable sources, including wind and solar power, by the year 2020? Isn't that a vision worthy of America? Developing new energy technologies can create thousands of good new jobs. Renewable energy can be generated, transported and consumed in America. And we can export our technology. I don't think we should take a backseat to the Germans or the Japanese in creating clean energies no American soldier will ever have risk life and limb to protect.

The Administration's energy plan would make us more dependent on foreign oil in 2020 than we are today and would increase global-warming pollution more than 30%. Each new fleet of cars and trucks is using more fuel than the one that came before. Our oldest and most polluting power plants are exempt from clean-air standards.

We must do better than we are doing. We should cap carbon emissions from power plants and make cars and trucks more efficient. Renewable fuels like ethanol from corn and other biomass sources can displace oil in vehicles, if we help create the opportunity.

There's no way to solve global warming overnight. But it's the American way to accept the hard work of making our country strong and our environment healthy. That kind of leadership wouldn't just change the tone in Washington; it would secure a cleaner and safer future.