By Jim Tankersley

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) offered a stark message today to her colleagues who want to delay or kill major reductions in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions: You've already lost.

Boxer chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, and she's drafting the Senate version of a so-called "cap and trade" bill that would limit the emissions scientists blame for climate change.

In what she dubbed a "reality check on global warming," Boxer said a growing series of regional emissions caps - and the high likelihood that the Obama administration will soon take the first steps toward regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act - suggest that Congress' only choices on emissions limits are to set them itself, or to watch others do it.

"I am here today to say that the days of inaction on climate change have ended," Boxer said. "The question is, will Congress continue to play a small part or a central role?"

The comments rebuked Boxer's Republican counterpart on the committee, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a global warming skeptic who lambasted the cap-and-trade proposal on the Senate floor this week - calling it all costs and no benefits for American taxpayers.

"If it is time for anything," he said, "it is time for us to get realistic about these policies, and focus on what is achievable, both globally and domestically, to help bring down energy costs to consumers and make us more energy secure so the American public doesn't get yet another raw deal."

By Jim Tankersley

President Obama is big on science.

He said as much on the campaign trail, where he ripped President George W. Bush for suppressing scientific debate in the federal government; in his transition to the White House, when he nominated Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Chu to lead the energy department; and yesterday, when he rolled back Bush's limits on stem-cell research and issued a memo to strengthen the role of science in government decision-making.

Obama promised a cheering East Room crowd yesterday that those moves would "ensure that in this new administration, we base our public policies on the soundest science."

But in two early policy moves - on wolves and global warming - Obama has found scientists questioning the soundness of his decisions.

(Undated handout photo of a grey wolf from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. AP Photo)

by Jim Tankersley

After reversing President Bush on a pack of environmental rules in its first month, the Obama administration let one of Bush's last-minute changes stand on Friday: the removal of the gray wolf from the endangered species list in the Upper Midwest, Idaho and Montana.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the decision in a noon press conference, saying the finding by the Fish and Wildlife Service under Bush was "a supportable one...scientists have concluded that recovery has occurred."

He also agreed with the Bush administration's decision to keep the wolf on the endangered species list in Wyoming, calling that state's wolf recovery plan insufficient. He praised Idaho and Montana's efforts to restore and manage wolf populations and said "I do not believe we should hold those states hostage to the inadequacy we've seen in Wyoming."

The de-listing was the latest chapter in an ongoing battle over wolves between the federal government and environmental groups, who successfully sued to keep the animal on the endangered list. Bush's Interior Department announced it in the final days of his term, and it wasn't finalized by the time Obama took office and froze all pending rule changes.

Salazar's announcement on Friday almost assuredly means environmentalists will sue again to keep the wolf under federal protection, continuing the saga of an animal that rouses fierce debate among ranchers and conservationists in the West.

By Jim Tankersley

As I reported exclusively in the Los Angeles Times this morning, President Obama is set to instruct federal agencies to once again consult with endangered-species experts before moving ahead with construction projects, overruling a last-minute rule change by the Bush administration.

Obama will issue the decision in a presidential memorandum, effectively bypassing the lengthy public comment process traditionally required for changing a rule. Business groups are protesting, saying the change will hamper critical road-building and other projects needed to jump-start the economy.

"It's almost certainly going to slow down all of these projects, even the stimulus-backed projects," said Ross Eisenberg, an environment and energy counsel for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "What we're getting is more red tape."

Environmentalists call it a victory for threatened plants and wildlife. "This is very good news for endangered species," said Andrew Wetzler, endangered species program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The regulations that President Bush issued were clearly illegal, and they were bad policy to boot."

by Jim Tankersley

Earlier this week, Energy Secretary Steven Chu caused a stir in the Golden State - and many circles across the country - with his warnings that global warming could spell the demise of California agriculture by century's end.

Chu isn't a climate scientist - he's a Nobel-winning physicist - but he's served on several climate-change commissions, and in his position, will be one of President Obama's point men on the climate issue. His comments came in a 40-minute interview, his first since being confirmed as secretary.

"This is a real economic disaster in the making for our children, for your children," he said, near the end of an extended riff on the topic.

Here, for the first time, is that riff, only slightly edited for length. For all sides of the climate debate, it makes for fascinating reading.

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by Jim Tankersley

The Environmental Protection Agency announced this morning that it has reopened consideration of a request by California and more than a dozen other states to set strict standards for greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles - hinting strongly that it's just a matter of time before they're approved.

Following a directive issued by President Obama late last month, the EPA said it will begin accepting public comments for 60 days on the request, which proponents call a major step toward curbing global warming. Critics say allowing the states to set tougher rules than the federal government would batter the domestic auto industry, by forcing carmakers to produce two sets of vehicles or to restrict production of big-selling - but heavy emitting - trucks and SUVs.

"EPA has now set in motion an impartial review of the California waiver decision," EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a press release. "It is imperative that we get this decision right, and base it on the best available science and a thorough understanding of the law."

But the next two paragraphs of the release strongly suggest the agency will approve California's request.

"The Clean Air Act gives EPA the authority to allow California to adopt its own emission standards for motor vehicles due to the seriousness of the state's air pollution challenges," it reads. "There is a long-standing history of EPA granting waivers to the state of California.

"EPA believes that there are significant issues regarding the agency's denial of the waiver. The denial was a substantial departure from EPA's longstanding interpretation of the Clean Air Act's waiver provisions."

By Jim Tankersley

For all the fire they can spit on C-SPAN, ranting about procedure or policy, the truth is that most United States senators are exceedingly polite to one another in public. Friendly, often.

Every once in a while - like, say, when a sitting member of a senate committee appears before that committee for a hearing into his pending nomination to a cabinet post - you get, in the words of one participant, "a full-fledged bouquet-tossing contest."

And oddly enough, a few nuggets of policy plans.

That's the scene this morning in a meeting of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee, which is quizzing committee member Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) on his nomination to be Interior Secretary under President-elect Barack Obama.

Republicans and Democrats have repeatedly told Salazar how much they admire his integrity and how they'll miss him when he leaves the Senate. They've called him brother, professed their love, and invited him to visit their states (and, in the case of Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida, offered to arrange for him to wrestle alligators in the Everglades).

"I think Mel just probably left to go buy you flowers," Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) joked after Martinez called Salazar a "good friend." This after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), made the crack about bouquet tossing.

By Jim Tankersley

You can't cross a street in Washington these days without bumping into someone with a 12-point set of recommendations for President-elect Barack Obama and the massive economic stimulus plan he and Congressional leaders are drafting. And now that Congress is back in session, some of those plans are making their way into the public record - and key lawmakers' ears.

To wit: The Senate Environment and Public Works committee convened a briefing in a Senate hearing room this morning, on the topic of "green" investments and their role in economic recovery.

Testifying before a crowd of fawning Democratic senators were a pair of hot names in energy circles: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, author of "Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America," and clean energy venture capitalist John Doerr, whose track record includes investments in Google and Amazon.com.

Both men called clean energy development the solution to America's economic, environmental and national security challenges. They urged major tax incentives to help speed renewable technologies to competitiveness and big spending to build an infrastructure to carry renewable energy from the wind turbines and solar panels that produce it to the cities and suburbs that consume it.

by Jim Tankersley

The energy and environmental front is coming into focus in the Obama transition:

President-elect Barack Obama will tap:

-- Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu as his energy secretary.

-- Former New Jersey environmental commissioner Lisa Jackson as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

-- Former EPA administrator Carol Browner, who served in the Clinton administration and served as director of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection before that, as a high-level energy adviser reporting to the president.

A senior Democrat confirmed these appointments for Tribune's Washington Bureau.rhis evening. Obama plans a press conference in Chicago on Thursday.

by Mark Silva

The man who has won the White House will meet today with the man who fell 537 votes of winning the White House, yet a man who shares a Nobel Prize for his work on climate control. One is hot, hot hot at the moment, the other intent on averting global warming.

President-elect Barack Obama's meeting in Chicago today with former Vice President Al Gore comes in a week of expected announcements of the next elements of Obama's leadership team. He has announced the economic team, and the national security team. Now comes the green team.

Watch for Energy and Interior secretaries this week, and perhaps a new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Dont watch for Gore in the lineup, though.

Gore, who is on his way this week to Poland to meet with delegates from 190 countries debating a new global climate-change treaty, has said that he can probably be more effective as an advocate for the environment as a private citizen. He will meet today with Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden to discuss energy and climate change and how to make policies on those fronts tools for improving the economy.

The massive public works program that Obama will propose -- seeking 2.5 million new jobs over the next couple of years -- will include projects that make Americans more energy efficient in the process of employing people: Installing meters that provide an accurate and current reading on energy consumption and savings, installing new insulation and roofs. The three plan to issue a statement after their meeting.

Think of it as a few former senators sitting around brainstorming. Think anyone might talk about the Sunshine State in the process, the place where Gore fell just a few hundred votes shy of becoming the 43rd president and where Obama racked up a 2.5 percentage point lead in the amassing of the electoral mandate that made him the 44th?

Not likely.

The talk at the transition team's table today is more likely to turn toward glacial melting than electoral landslides. And this is a remarkable discussion, near the end of an administration that rode that disputed Florida election in 2000 to victory and took the better part of eight years to acknowledge that man might have something to do with global warming. It' may be a Red, White and Blue Christmas at the Bush White House this season, but Obama will soon be painting the place green.

(Photo of Al Gore, 2007 Noble Peace Prize Laureate , receiving an honorary doctorate at Waseda University in Tokyo in November, by Junko Kimura/Getty Images)

by Janet Hook

In a sign that President-elect Barack Obama's environmental agenda will receive strong support from Capitol Hill, House Democrats today voted to install Rep. Henry Waxman of Los Angeles as leader of the House committee that handles environmental legislation, ousting the auto industry's strongest ally, Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, from the job.

Waxman is an advocate of much stricter regulation to curb global warming than Dingell, who as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committe had compiled a long record of defending the auto industry against emissions rules that automakers consider too strict.

Waxman's promotion to chairman of the committee was approved 137-122 in a closed meeting of the House Democratic Caucus.

He argued that the panel needed new leadership in order to manage upcoming legislation on healthcare, energy and global warming -- all signature issues of Obama. Dingell, who is 82 and recovering from knee surgery, argued that there was no reason to upend the House's longstanding seniority system.

by Andrew Zajac

A federal court in Washington earlier this week handed conservationists a big win by reinstating tighter limits on snowmobiling in Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks and the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway connecting them.

While it appears that she's been silent on the issue of snowmobiling in Alaska's sprawling national parks as governor, Sarah Palin took a more supportive attitude toward it when she served as mayor of Wasilla.

In 1998, Mayor Palin backed a City of Wasilla resolution calling for a resumption of snowmobiling within the two-million acre Mt. McKinley National Park, opposing what at the time was a temporary ban on the activity imposed by the National Park Service.
Read the resolution here: Palin snowmobiles

by Mark Silva

Tough news for Dick Cheney - and word of interest to Todd Palin as well -- from the federal court in Washington, courtesy of our court-watching Countdown to Crawford friends.

The Bush administration has attempted to expand access for snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park, after first President Nixon and then President Carter imposed limits on off-road vehicles in the national parks.

But now, as President Bush prepares to leave office, Countdown's Jim Gerstenzang reports on a Washington Post report, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan has tossed a National Park Service plan crafted in 2007. It would have allowed 540 recreational snowmobiles and 83 snow coaches a day to enter Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks and the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway.

The Grand Tetons tower above Jackson Hole, where the soon-retiring Cheney maintains a secluded home deep in a heavily forested spread, Countdown notes.

The plan developed by the Bush administration "is arbitrary and capricious, unsupported by the record, and contrary to law," opined Sullivan, nominated to the federal court by President Clinton, after serving in District of Columbia superior and appeals courts to which he was named by Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. The plan "clearly elevates use over conservation of park resources and values and fails to articulate why the Plan's 'major adverse impacts' are 'necessary and appropriate to fulfill the purposes of the park.''

Appeal, vows Ed Klim, president of the International Snowmobile Manufacturers Association, telling the New York Times: "This is not the end of the issue.''

Gerstenzang notes that a certain "First Dude'' - Alaska's - also may be watching this court case. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's husband Todd, husband of the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee, is a champion snowmobile racer.

(Todd and Sarah Palin at the start of the Iron Dog snowmobile race in 2007. Al Grillo / Associated Press.)

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

by Frank James

There's been no let up in the criticism by environmentalists of the Bush Administration's changes, announced yesterday, to the Endangered Species Act that would essentially leave it to various federal agencies to determine the impact of their projects on endangered species without involving the federal officials most responsible for protecting such animals.

It's one thing to have environmentalists upset. It's another to have Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) the act's founding father as it were and definitely not the kind of person big-business types would call a tree-hugger, issuing the following sort of statement today:

Dingell Outraged Over Proposed ESA Changes

"I wrote the Endangered Species Act and seeing it signed into law was among my proudest moments as a Member of Congress. The changes sought by the Bush Administration would seriously weaken the law, eliminating the requirement that scientists be the ones making decisions regarding science, instead giving political hacks and unsympathetic bureaucrats another opportunity to attack the scientific community. It is remarkable that this bill, signed into law by Richard M. Nixon and accepted for decades as a pillar of American conservation would be destroyed by George W. Bush in the final months of his Administration. It is most peculiar that a statute which has done so much good should be now jeopardized by the stroke of a hostile Presidential pen."

by William Neikirk

Former Vice President Al Gore returned to the nation's capital today to issue a stunning challenge: The United States must abandon fossil fuels in generating electricity over the next decade to conquer the danger of global warming.

He said it should be done, could be done, but didn't express confidence that it would be done. His speech raised the question of whether Gore, as a political figure, has enough clout and stature to inspire the kind of solution he outlined.

The former vice president knows he is stepping on many toes and special interests in trying to summon support for such a national crusade. The fact that his rhetoric has yet to break a Washington deadlock over climate change would be reason to doubt the power of his own persona and his scary scenarios.

And will ordinary Americans sign on to this plan? That is a key issue, especially since the country is grappling with gasoline prices topping $4 a gallon and an economy teetering on the edge of a recession. Although viewed as an alarmist by conservatives, Gore hopes that the current climate will make Americans more willing to go along with his drastic plan.

The survival of the country is at risk, Gore warned, and "the future of civilization is at stake" as the planet warms as a result of heat-trapping "greenhouse gases" accumulating in the atmosphere.

And, he said, U.S. national security would be severely threatened without the kind of plan he outlined today. He raised the specter of "hundreds of millions of climate refugees" being able to cause political instability around the world.

The Nobel Prize-winning Gore called for a national effort akin to the country's effort to put a man on the moon, inspired in a famous speech by President John F. Kennedy.

by Katie Fretland and updated

How does California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger feel about global warming in 12 words or less?

At a 2007 luncheon in honor of Florida Gov. Charlie Crist's efforts to combat climate change, Schwarzenegger pulled out a line from his action star days.

"We have to say 'hasta la vista baby' to the greenhouse gases," he said.

A year later, the Governator is still fighting that fight, now calling President Bush's administration "bogus" on climate change.

The Environmental Protection Agency decided last week not to take further action against global warming while Bush remains in office. The EPA declined to declare greenhouse gases unhealthy to the public.

At the Group of Eight Summit this month, world leaders said they made significant progress by agreeing to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, but environmental groups say that decision was a failure to address more immediate goals.

Today in an interview with ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," Schwarzenegger was asked about rumors that Obama would ask him to take a position within his potential administration relating to energy or the environment.

"I'm always ready to help in any way I can the United States, because as you know, I've committed myself to be a public servant, because this country has given me everything.... I'd take his call now and I'd take his call when he's president, anytime," Schwarzenegger said.

by Mark Silva

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pumped up President Bush in a re-election campaign rally at a Columbus, Ohio, hockey arena four years ago. But Bush has let Schwarzenegger, and the world, down on global warming, the governor maintains.

""This administration did not believe in global warming," Schwarzenegger told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos in an interview that will air Sunday on ABC's This Week.

"They just didn't believe in it or they didn't believe that they should do anything about it, since China is not doing anything about it and since India is not willing to do the same thing, so why should we do the same thing?" Schwarzenegger maintains - and that's not the American way, says this son of Austria who found his fortune in his adopted homeland.

"We don't wait for other countries to do the same thing,'' Schwarzenegger tells Stephanopoulos (there's a couple of mouthsful for you). "That's what makes America number one... And I think we have a good opportunity to do the same thing, also, with fighting global warming.''

Schwarzenegger's comments follow the Environmental Protection Agency's decision not to take further action against global warming during the remainder of Bush's presidency.

"To be honest with you, if they would have done something this year, I would have thought it was bogus anyway," the governor says. "You don't change global warming and you don't really have an effect by doing something six months before you leave office....

"This administration did not believe that [carbon dioxide] and greenhouse gases is a pollutant,'' he says. "They fought this in court and then finally the Supreme Court had to tell them, 'Yes, it is a pollutant.''

The Republican governor also seizes the opportunity of this appearance on the Sunday morning talk show to tout his own state's initiatives on climate change: "I'm very happy that California is in the forefront. We are very aggressive. We have made a commitment to roll back our greenhouse gas emissions to the 1990 level ... We didn't wait for Washington.

"The administration and the federal government have been terrific partners in a lot of things for us and we have worked together very well,'' Schwarzenegger says, "but environmental issues was not one of them."

by Frank James

In a move that shouldn't surprise anyone, the Bush Administration decided it wanted no part of regulating the greenhouse gases most scientific experts believe contribute to global warming.

The EPA decision took the form of a 588-page document issued by the Environmental Protection Agency in which the EPA declined to take the vital step of declaring greenhouse gases unhealthy to the public.

If the EPA had done so, the agency would have been required by law to regulate greenhouse gases. Last year, the Supreme Court said the EPA had the authority to make such regulations if it determined that such gases were harmful to Americans' health.

Even though Bush has publicly accepted the premise that humans are contributing to global warming, his administration has opposed such regulations on the grounds that the U.S. economy could potentially be bogged down if the EPA were required to sign off on thousands or more projects and activities across the nation that influenced greenhouse gases.

The Bush administration's view on new EPA rules also mirrors its objections to the Kyoto Protocol; that the global warming problem is by definition a world-wide problem and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for the U.S. to burden its economy with rules and costs to fight global warming if developing nations like China and India weren't similarly constrained.

So Bush's EPA essentially punted, leaving it to a future president and Congresses to determine how the EPA should proceed. In lieu of making regulations, the EPA issued a document that, among other things, merely sums up the objections it heard from across the administration to possible regulations.

by Katie Fretland

The Group of Eight industrialized nations today decided on a plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050 in an effort to combat global warming, but environmentalists say the proposal falls short of setting more immediate goals.

Leaders from the United States, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Britain, Canada and Italy issued a joint communique asking for a global response from all major economies on climate change.

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said long negotiations in the year since the last G8 summit in Germany led to today's agreement.

However, environmentalists criticized the plan.

Marthinus van Schalkwyk, the South African minister of environmental affairs and tourism, called the statement an "empty slogan."

"To be meaningful and credible, a long term goal must have a base year, it must be underpinned by ambitious midterm targets and actions," van Schalkwyk said.

Kim Carstensen, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Global Climate Initiative, said the G8's agreement reflects little change since the last summit.

"So little progress after a whole year of minister meetings and negotiations is not only a wasted opportunity, it falls dangerously short of what is needed to protect people and nature from climate change," Carstensen said.

Greenhouse gas emissions must fall within the next 15 years, scientists have said, in order to keep global temperatures down and avoid serious damage to the environment and extreme weather.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

(Photo by AP shows British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, President Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper--left to right.)

by Matthew Hay Brown

Congress left Washington last week for the Fourth of July break, but gasoline prices take no holiday - and neither does the campaign by congressional Republican leaders to push for more domestic drilling.

House Republican Leader John A. Boehner is highlighting today's CNN/Opinion Research poll finding that 73 percent of Americans in favor of expanded offshore drilling for oil and natural gas in protected U.S. waters. The survey of 1,000 Americans from June 26 to 29 is the latest to show rising support among beleaguered consumers for increasing access to America's oil reserves.

"For decades, Democrats have locked up our nation's natural energy sources, and with $4.10 per gallon gasoline and $145 per barrel oil, American families and small businesses are literally paying the price. While the Democratic Majority refuses to schedule meaningful legislation to help reduce gasoline prices, the American people are saying 'enough is enough.' "

Democrats say such drilling would harm the environment while doing little to reduce prices at the pump. Forty-nine percent of poll respondents believe environmental protection should be given priority, even at the risk of curbing economic growth, while 44 percent said the government should focus on economic growth, even at the expense of the environment.

Carroll Muffett, deputy campaigns director at Greenpeace, called the choice "a false dichotomy."

"In truth, what is truly good for the environment is what is truly good for the economy, because a shift to better energy solutions would create jobs," Muffett told CNN.

By Josh Mitchell and wire reports

The Pentagon and the Environmental Protection Agency are mired in a dispute over the pace of environmental cleanups at Maryland's Fort Meade and Fort Detrick, where contamination from fuels and munitions for years seeped into soil and groundwater.

The Pentagon says that it has spent more than $120 million cleaning up Fort Meade in Anne Arundel County and Fort Detrick in Frederick County and that it plans to spend tens of millions more on the efforts.

But defense officials have refused to sign an EPA order setting a more aggressive timetable and establishing fines for missed deadlines.

Another 10 locations are in dispute at facilities in New Jersey, Florida, Massachusetts, Virginia, Maryland, Alabama, Florida and Hawaii.

The dispute has intensified in recent days, with the EPA moving to add Fort Detrick to its Superfund list of the nation's most contaminated sites, a list that includes Fort Meade and Aberdeen Proving Ground in Harford County.

And late yesterday, Maryland Sens. Benjamin L. Cardin and Barbara A. Mikulski called for congressional hearings on the Defense Department's refusal to sign the order.

"DoD is not above the law and is not exempt from EPA regulations," Cardin said in a statement. "This issue affects not only Fort Meade - but the thousands of people living, working, praying and playing on base and in nearby communities."

Pentagon officials said that they are aggressively cleaning up the Maryland military posts and that the EPA's latest order exaggerates the extent of the problem.

"Our cleanup effort has not waned," said Tad Davis, a deputy assistant secretary of the Army, adding that there is no health risk to people on the posts.

"That order is based on the premise that there is an imminent and substantial endangerment to health and human safety, which we believe is completely false. That's the whole purpose of what we've been doing to date, is to make sure that the actions we've taken provide a safe environment to the soldiers, family members and civilians that work on Fort Meade."

Read the full story in the Baltimore Sun.

by Mark Silva

As leaders of the world's major economic powers prepare for a meeting in Japan next month, an adviser to President Bush says they have not reached agreement yet on a long-term plan for emissions of greenhouse gases.

Bush and the leaders of the rest of the Group of Eight nations will meet at Toyaka for their annual G-8 summit after the Fourth of July, and they also will meet with leaders of China, India, Brazil and other economic powers taking part in climate change talks which Bush had held promise of delivering an agreement on national goals by the end of his presidency.

Jim Connaughton, the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, offered a briefing for reporters last night about the status of ministerial-level talks leading up to the G-8 and major economies meetings. He was finishing the fourth round of such talks in South Korea.

"Our goal is to pull together the agenda for a meeting of the leaders of the world's major economies on -- to discuss energy security and climate change,'' he said. "This will be the first time the leaders have come together in that number and in that configuration, to have a candid exchange about some of the most difficult issues related to advancing the agenda on climate change.

"We've been talking about the general direction of the major economies in providing leadership in addressing greenhouse gas emissions, consistent with promotion and sustaining economic growth, and poverty eradication especially in the developing countries,'' he said, unable to divulge details. "These meetings are private, high-level, and we really are able to sort of press on some of the tougher issues that have been eluding the climate negotiators.''

What about any progress on the goal which many have of a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050?

"The long-term goal is a new issue,'' he said. "It was not a subject of discussions among any of the countries until it was put on the table by several countries in conjunction with the G8 meetings last year in Heiligendamm... and it was a pretty big deal for all the countries to agree that they be considering a global vision that they would share and they would try to translate that into a specific shared goal. ...

"There's no agreement on a long-term goal until the end of next year when all the parties come together in agreement,'' Connaughton said. "All I can say at this time is that we have advanced the discussion... The long-term goal is a very complex subject, as you look at the various scenarios for how you get from here to there.''

(Transocean drill ship, Discoverer Enterprise, the world's largest. Photo: Company handout/AFP/Getty Images)

by Frank James

One of most relevant news stories in the last 24 hours was in the New York Times. With all the talk about whether to drill for oil offshore or not, there's just this one not so little sticking point that many people probably didn't realize: There's aren't enough ocean-drilling ships to meet today's demand, let alone any signicant new demand.

As President Bush calls for repealing a ban on drilling off most of the coast of the United States, a shortage of ships used for deep-water offshore drilling promises to impede any rapid turnaround in oil exploration and supply.

In recent years, this global shortage of drill-ships has created a critical bottleneck, frustrating energy company executives and constraining their ability to exploit known reserves or find new ones. Slow growth in oil supplies, at a time of soaring demand, has been a major factor in the spike of oil and gasoline prices.

Houston-based Transocean is the largest provider of such ships to the oil industry and sees the logjam in orders lasting for years.

Transocean believes the deepwater market will continue to be constrained until at least 2012. Over three-quarters of the drill-ships currently under construction have already been contracted to oil companies eager to benefit from triple-digit oil prices, Mr. Long said.

by Frank James

House Democrats responded to President Bush's proposal to end the moratorium on drilling for oil offshore as well as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by telling the president to drop dead, although they used a lot more words to make the same point.

The Democrats' main argument was that the oil industry is already in possession of 68 million acres of oil leases and that Big Oil should drill away on those before they come around asking the federal government for any more land or ocean floor.

At a Capitol Hill press conference following Bush's White House Rose Garden appearance, Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts ridiculed the president as essentially a mouthpiece for the oil and gas industry.

Then he urged Bush to support legislation that would charge oil companies fees that would increase the longer the companies hold onto the leases without producing oil on them:

And you know, today is an historic day. The president has decided to take out some of the oldest ideas which the oil and gas industry have had for destroying the most pristine wilderness and shoreline that we have in the United States. After eight years, President Bush and Dick Cheney have turned the GOP into the "Gas and Oil Party." That's the legacy that they are going to leave.

And what we're going to do, Mr. (Rahm) Emanuel, Mr. (Nick) Rahall, Mr. (Maurice) Hinchey and the Democratic Party is going to do, is we're going to give them a chance in the White House to put their money where their mouth is. We're going to give them a chance to impose fees on the oil industry on the public lands where they do not drill, where the American people have already given them an opportunity to drill. And we will increase the fees as the years go by, because otherwise, they will have wound up warehousing where the oil is in the United States that the American people, the Democratic Party, everyone wants them to drill, but they're refusing to drill, and at the same time, they're insisting that we should go to places that should be preserved forever.

by Mark Silva

President Bush, attempting to put political pressure on the Democratic-run Congress in an election year plagued by soaring gasoline prices, today called for a lifting of federal bans against off-shore oil drilling and other measures to boost oil production.

"For many Americans, there is no more pressing concern than the price of gasoline,'' the president said in a Rose Garden appearance this morning. "Families across the country are looking to Washington for a response.''

The president, who faces opposition in Congress for his proposals to drill off-shore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as well as to the leasing of Western federal lands for extraction of oil from shale, is attempting to leverage the rising price of gas - which has now surpassed $4 a gallon - in a bid to get Congress to budge before Election Day, if not sooner.

"There is no excuse for delay,'' Bush said, acknowledging that it will take years for any of his proposals to pump new oil into the American economy. "It's time to move swiftly.''

If Congress leaves for its July Fourth recess without action, the Republican president suggested, "they will have to explain why $4 a gallon gas is not enough of a reason to act.''

by Frank James

Has the U.S. passed the point where it can enjoy the luxury of restricting drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf and even the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?

That is clearly the decision that's been made by Sen. John McCain, the all-but-official Republican presidential nominee, who now supports drilling off the U.S. coast, though he's still hanging on, for now, to his opposition to drilling in Alaska. Florida politicians and fellow Republicans like Gov. Charlie Crist and Sen. Mel Martinez have followed suit.

President Bush has long supported drilling in Alaska but is now calling for lifting the federal ban on off-shore drilling.

Democrats, at least to this point, are showing no such change of heart. Indeed, it will be harder for Democrats to make a similar shift because the party has an environmental constituency that would make such a move painful for any Democratic politician who dares suggest that such drilling bans be lifted.

Many Democrats and environmentalists argue the nation can't "drill it's way out of the problem," that any effort to increase the domestic production of oil just continues the nation's addition to that energy source by postponing the needed transition to alternative and renewable fuel sources and increased conservation.

by Mark Silva

Republicans are ready to open the spigots of offshore oil reserves long considered off-limits for environmental reasons, with President Bush planning to call on Congress today to lift its moratorium against drilling in near off-shore waters.

Bush plans to make a public appeal for his plan in the Rose Garden of the White House at 10:35 am EDT.

The call for a lifting of a decades-old federal moratorium - particularly in parts of the Gulf of Mexico close to Florida as well as off the Pacific coast of California -- is likely to face sharp resistance, however, with Democratic leaders in Congress opposing such a move, and environmentalists in both states adamantly against it. The moratorium covers most coastal waters.

The president insists that only by boosting domestic oil drilling and pursuing alternative sources of energy - including exploration in the off-limits Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - can the U.S. grow less reliant on foreign oil and offer any promise of easing gas prices. Critics say it will take too long for any new drilling to have an impact on rising prices, and in some places, such the off-limit Gulf waters near Florida's coastline estimated reserves are too small to have any real impact on supply.

For a quarter century, new drilling for oil and gas off most of the U.S. coastline has been banned in part to protect tourism and to avert the spoiling of beaches with oil spills. But gas prices soaring past $4 per gallon this summer have put new pressure on political leaders - including Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the party's presumptive presidential nominee, who moved to ease the moratorium on off-shore drilling a day before Bush's push.

Bush effectively is renewing his own call to open U.S. coastal waters to oil and gas development. He plans to ask Congress today to lift the drilling ban in place since 1981 in more than 80 percent of the Outer Continental Shelf and to let states help to decide where to allow drilling.

"The president believes Congress shouldn't waste any more time," said White House Press Secretary Dana Perino. Bush "will explicitly call on Congress to ... pass legislation lifting the congressional ban on safe, environmentally friendly offshore oil drilling."

by Mark Silva

First he was willing to "look" at a windfall oil profits tax.

Now he is against it.

First he was for a federal moratorium on off-shore oil-drilling.

Now he is for easing it.

Sen. John McCain, confronting the politics of rising gasoline prices and attempting to navigate his own way through the channels of Republican tax policy, today bashed Democrat Sen. Barack Obama for supporting a windfall profits tax and proposed that states be allowed to drill off-shore.

What was even more remarkable is how Florida's leading Republicans - in a state where opposition to oil-drilling has long been a litmus test for both parties - also voiced an openness to reconsideration.

"It is an evolving position for him,'' Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) said of his party's presidential candidate's stance on Gulf oil drilling, "as it is for me, as it is, I think, for a lot of Floridians who are now being tremendously upset about the high cost of gas.

Consider this report from CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer:

by Mark Silva

Political conventions are known for a certain conviviality which often spills into the local watering holes when all the floor speeches are finished. But this is taking beer-power to a whole new level:

Our colleagues at The Stew report that the official General Motors vehicles at the Democratic National Convention - the ones shuttling delegates, candidates and the rest from place to place - will not only be running on flex-fuel, but also will get their ethanol from a uniquely Coloradan source: The Molson Coors Brewing Company.

The good brewers at Golden report that "waste beer,'' the byproduct of a big brewery that bottles and cans only the best - now you see why they are so interested in promoting this relationship - can be recycled for use as ethanol. And that's the ethanol that will be running the DNC's officials vehicles in Denver this summer.

The Stew's Christopher Borrelli followed up with the RNC to see what they have planned for their convention fleet in Minneapolis-St. Paul. It turns out the Republicans, too, will use GM-donated hybrid vehicles, also running on flex-fuel. But they won't be consuming beer-anol. And they say so with a certain nose-turned-up.

So leave it to the Democrats to find an environmentally friendly use for "waste beer.'' And thanks to our friends at The Stew.

Wonder what time last call is at the gas station.

by Andrew Zajac

People from Washington go to the beach to get away from the city's hot air, both meteorological and political.

One of the preferred destinations is Ocean City, Maryland, where the mayor, Richard Meehan recently had some fun with the public's increased awareness of global warming.

Meehan filmed a promotional spot inviting tourists to book their vacations "before the ocean evaporates" -- something he says it's expected to do in a billion years.

Check out Meehan's 1950s civil defense-style pitch here and above.

by Frank James

You know those dazzling car rims called "spinners", the ones that spin even though the vehicle is at a dead stop? The U.S. Senate is the legislative version of that.

Wednesday, the Senate was in full spinners mode. The climate-change bill was under consideration but basically nothing got done because of a partisan fight (what else?) over federal judges.

Senate Republicans were outraged because Senate Democrats who control the chamber haven't moved to take up President Bush's judicial appointees with the same speed seen at the end of other presidencies, Republicans said.

So, the Republicans forced the poor Senate clerks to read an amendment to the bill that was the length of a Tolstoy novel.

The truth is, some Republicans don't like the climate-change bill to begin with since they think all the talk about global warming is a bunch of bunk or that it would wind up imposing vast new taxes on Americans. So any reason to slow down the bill was probably all right with them.

Anyway, the stated reason for the Senate Republicans throwing sand in the legislative gears was the fight over 15 judges.

by Mark Silva

With big votes coming up in Congress before the summer break, the Environmental Defense Action Fund isn't interested in giving anyone a break on the Climate Security Act.

"Some in Big Oil and coal would do anything to drive this bill into the ground,'' says the star of this ad running in the district of Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and a proponent of action to avert global warming.

The ad is worth the watch.

Polar bear mother and her two cubs in Wapusk National Park on Hudson Bay near Churchill, Manitoba, Nov. 6, 2007. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press,Jonathan Hayward)

by Frank James

It's official. Polar bears are a federally designated endangered species.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne made the announcement this very hour that the Bush Administration is declaring the bears endangered because the melting Arctic ice pack, courtesy of global warming, threatens their habitat.

The administration was racing the clock to beat a federal court order which directed the Interior Department to decide by Thursday, as in tomorrow.

There are about 20,000 polar bears roaming the Arctic, living off seals and anything else they can hunt down.

The Bush Administration last year had tried declare the fairly awesome creature merely "threatened" which wouldn't have required any more action on its part. That caused an environmental group to sue, leading to today's decision.

Environmentalists that the decision will force the federal government to be more aggressive in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions since the Endangered Species Act requires affirmative steps to change the conditions that place a species on the list.

But while conceding that the bears are endangered, Kempthorne was clear the administration didn't want environmentalist to try and use the new designation to force the government's hand on greenhouse emissions.

by Frank James

Former Vice President Al Gore will be campaigning but not in the way many people have asked him to--at least not yet.

In an effort that on the surface appears to have little to do with presidential politics, Gore is the force behind a three-year, $300 million public-advocacy campaign to get Americans to become more involved in the fight against global warming.

Gore is supporting the fairly massive advertising campaign by the Alliance for Climate Protection whose first ad is at the top of this post.

According to the Washington Post, the ads and other marketing efforts will constitute one of the largest public-advocacy campaigns ever.

Gore gave the Post an extended interview in which he sounds somewhat exasperated by the inability of the nation's political leadership to collectively get its act together in the global-warming fight.

"This climate crisis is so interwoven with habits and patterns that are so entrenched, the elected officials in both parties are going to be timid about enacting the bold changes that are needed until there is a change in the public's sense of urgency in addressing this crisis," Gore said. "I've tried everything else I know to try. The way to solve this crisis is to change the way the public thinks about it."

Post reporter Julie Eilperin evidently tried to get Gore to open up about how much he was kicking into the $300 million effort. Looks like he didn't want to talk specifics.

While Gore declined to quantify his contribution to the effort, he has devoted all his proceeds from the Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," the best-selling companion book, his salary from the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers and several international prizes, such as the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which add up to more than a $2.7 million.

So it would appear the former veep is putting his money where his very capable mouth is.

by Mark Silva

Al Gore, the Nobel Prize-winning former vice president and Democratic nominee for president in 2000 who won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College, contends that those who doubt global warming -- and he counts Vice President Dick Cheney in that crowd -- remind him of those who doubt that man landed on the moon or who believed the world is flat.

These are among the declarations that the Democratic warrior against climate change (and an ucommitted super-delegate so far this year) makes in an interview airing Sunday evening on CBS News' 60 Minutes. Another declaration: Gore, pictured right at a climate confernce in India, will use profits from his book and film, An Inconvenient Truth, to support a $300-million advertising campaign to boost awareness of global warming. Enter Toby Keith and the Dixie Chicks.

Gore, who repeatedly has ruled out another run for the White House yet is repeatedly asked the question in the midst of a protracted campagin for the Democratic nomination, speaks with Lesley Stahl in an interview airing at 7 pm EDT Sunday.

Stahl tells Gore that some prominent people, including the nation’s vice president, are not convinced that global warming is manmade.

Gore replies: “You’re talking about Dick Cheney. I think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view, they’re almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat.

"That demeans them a little bit, but it’s not that far off.''

Some of the ads that Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection will air will feature an ecumenical odd couple, the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Pat Robertson. as well as odd political bedfellows, Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich, and a pairing of country crooners who flank the right on left on the radio, Toby Keith and the Dixie Chicks.

(Photo of Gore in New Delhi March 15 by Raveendran / AFP / Getty Images)

by Frank James

The presidential candidates talk the talk when it comes to vowing to end America's addiction to oil but do they walk the walk or, better yet, drive the drive when it comes to their personal choices in the vehicles?

The answer appears mixed but there definitely is a tendency among them for bigger, gas guzzlers, as this photo gallery indicates.

by Matthew Hay Brown

The head of the EPA has agreed to appear before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee later this month – but the agency still hasn’t turned over the documents the panel has requested on his decision to block California from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who chairs the committee, called EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson’s “continuing refusal to cooperate” with the panel “absolutely unacceptable.”

“What started off as foot-dragging is looking suspiciously like a cover-up,” she said Friday. “What is Stephen Johnson trying to hide?”

Johnson denied California permission last month to begin regulating tailpipe emissions of the gases that scientists say contribute to global warming, reportedly against the unanimous recommendations of the EPA’s legal and technical staffs.

Boxer, who is investigating the ruling, had requested the documents in time for a “field briefing” she chaired Thursday in Los Angeles. EPA Associate Administrator Christopher P. Bliley told Boxer that her request could entail tens of thousands of e-mails and documents and that the agency would get back to her.

Boxer went ahead with the briefing, which featured an empty chair for the EPA – Johnson had declined her invitation to participate – and an empty box labeled “EPA Documents.”

Sen. Barbara Boxer, chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, at a January 30, 2007 Senate hearing. (Chuck Kennedy/MCT)

by Matthew Hay Brown

A delay in the decision on whether polar bears need to be protected from global warming has given Sen. Barbara Boxer another opportunity to blast the Bush administration on the environment.

“The Bush administration has failed to do what is necessary and once again they must be taken to court before they will act,” the California Democrat, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said today.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was supposed to make a recommendation to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne on whether polar bears should be protected under the Endangered Species Act because climate change threatens their habitat by Wednesday.

In a statement today, officials said they still needed a few more weeks.

“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working diligently to reach a final decision on the proposal to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act,” the agency said. “We expect to provide a final recommendation to the Secretary of the Interior and finalize the decision within the next month.”

Officials said new information supplied by the U.S. Geological Survey contributed to the delay. The USGS reported in September that thinning sea ice would lead to the deaths of two-thirds of the world’s polar bear population – including all those find in Alaska – by 2050.

“As a result of the new USGS research findings, the Service reopened and later extended a second comment period to allow the public time to review the information and respond,” the agency said. “We received numerous comments on the USGS reports and have been working to analyze and respond to the information provided during the comment period.”

by Matthew Hay Brown

The Senate investigation into the EPA decision last month on greenhouse gases isn’t going at all the way Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer wanted.

First, EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson declined Boxer’s invitation to defend his decision to deny California permission to begin regulating greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles at a “field briefing” next week in Los Angeles.

Now one of his associates tells the California Democrat that the agency won’t be providing the documents she requested in time for the session.

“Who does the Administrator think he and the EPA work for?” Boxer asked in a statement released late Friday. “The EPA Administrator needs to be reminded that he works for the American people. The Bush EPA can run, but they can’t hide. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold the Bush EPA accountable for this outrageous, unprecedented decision.”

EPA Associate Administrator Christopher B. Bliley wrote Boxer Friday that the agency was trying to gather the documents she requested, but would not be able to meet the Monday deadline she had set.

“Please be assured that EPA respects your very strong interest in this issue and is committed to providing the committee to the extent possible information necessary to satisfy its oversight interests consistent with our Constitutional and statutory obligations,” Bliley wrote. “Your request is a top priority for this agency and we are working hard to respond as quickly as possible.”

By Matthew Hay Brown

As oil futures topped $100 a barrel today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said congressional Democrats would try again to end government breaks for the industry – an approach that has been rejected by President Bush.

“It is unfortunate that President Bush opposed our legislation to repeal multi-billion dollar subsidies given to Big Oil companies,” Pelosi said in a statement. “We will again seek to repeal these subsidies and to enact strong legislation to stop price gouging at the pump and pursue anti-trust actions against OPEC entities that fix the price of oil.”

The White House, meanwhile, spoke of expanding domestic production, including drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

“We have to figure out a way to increase supply here in the United States, done in environmentally sensitive ways, which we know how to do, so that we can have an increase supply of oil here while world demand continues to increase at a really astronomical pace for demand for oil,” White House Press Secretary Dana Perino told reporters.

Violence in the Nigerian oil center of Port Harcourt and rough weather that threatened oil-exporting ports in Mexico helped push the price of light, sweet crude for February delivery over the century mark, the Associated Press reports. Adjusted for inflation, the cost remains within range of highs set in 1980.

Prices at the pump, which tend to lag behind futures, rose slightly today, according to the Oil Price Information Service. The national average cost of a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline climbed 0.6 cents today to $3.049. That was down from $3.061 a month ago, but up from $2.322 a year ago.

by Matthew Hay Brown

A Senate panel investigating EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson’s decision to deny California the authority to regulate automobile emissions of greenhouse gases apparently will have to proceed without Johnson himself.

The agency chief has denied an invitation by Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer to discuss his decision at a “field briefing” next month in Los Angeles, the committee said today.

“Rather than looking in the eyes of the people he is affecting, Mr. Johnson is hiding out in Washington, D.C.,” Boxer said in a statement. “His shameful decision denying the California waiver must be overturned.”

California, which has unique authority under federal law to develop its own air quality standards subject to EPA approval, had sought permission to begin limiting tailpipe emissions of the gases that scientists say contribute to global warming. A dozen other states, including New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Maryland, stood ready to enforce the California standards.

But Johnson denied the request last week, reportedly against the unanimous recommendations of the EPA's legal and technical staffs. Johnson said fuel efficiency standards signed into law by President Bush last week rendered the California proposal unnecessary.

by Matthew Hay Brown

Rep. Henry A. Waxman opened an investigation into an EPA decision to stop California from regulating greenhouse gas emissions today with a warning to the agency’s administrator: Don’t destroy those documents.

Waxman, the Los Angeles Democrat who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, wants to know why Stephen L. Johnson denied a request by the State of California to begin limiting greenhouse gas emissions from new automobiles.

“Prior to making this decision you assured the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, as well as the state of California and many others, that you would make this decision on the merits,” Waxman wrote to Johnson in a letter released by his office.

by Frank James

Fresh off his trip to Oslo, Norway to accept his Nobel Peace Prize for his role as the world's best-known Cassandra on global warming, former Vice President Al Gore was in Bali, Indonesia where he spoke to a United Nations climate conference today.

Gore took his nation, i.e. the Bush Administration, to task for being the leading obstacle to a new climate change agreement to supersede the Kyoto Protocol which is widely viewed as having been ineffective.

Here's an excerpt from the Associated Press's story:

The former vice president urged delegates to take urgent action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, and told them that the next U.S. president will likely be more supportive of international caps on polluting gases.

"My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali," said Gore, who flew to Bali from Oslo, Norway, where he received the Nobel Peace Prize for helping alert the world to the danger of climate change.

by Mark Silva

The only thing slower than the advance of the glaciers during the Ice Age, perhaps, is the acknowledgement of the Bush administration that there is a problem called “climate change’’ in the modern world, and that the activities of human beings have a lot to do with it.

“90-percent likely’’ – that’s what the White House says today.

This is particularly pertinent today, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body, issues its fourth assessment report. And it will have some relevance on Monday, Nov. 26, when President Bush receives the U.S. winners of the Nobel Prize at the White House, including Al Gore, the former vice president who shared the prize for his work on global warming and collected more votes than Bush in the presidential election of 2000.

“There’s a lot of misconceptions out there about the administration's position on this,’’ says Sharon Hays, representing the U.S. delegation at the IPCC meeting in Valencia, Spain, where they have spent the better part of the past week hashing out language on which all can agree.

James Connaughton, chairman of the president’s Council on Environmental Quality, says: “In 2001, the president clearly acknowledged what the National Academy of Science told him: That surface temperatures of the Earth are warming, and humans are part of that equation. Now… there’s different formulations of that over time. Different scientists say it differently. But that's sort of the simple conclusion, and he's been consistent in that view since.’’

Hays: “The president gave a speech back in 2001, I believe it was, in which he articulated his thoughts on climate change science. And when he made that speech, he echoed very clearly what the National Academies of Science was saying about climate change and the human attribution issue, which was, at that time, six years ago, less clear than it is now. And so his words echoed the National Academies of Sciences, which, in turn, were really a restatement of what appeared in the last assessment, the 2001 IPCC assessment on climate change.

“So the president has been saying the same thing as what the scientists have been saying about climate change, whether or not humans are playing a role in it, since 2001. More recently, the President made a speech at the Major Economies meeting that he convened where, again, he cited the IPCC directly in articulating the administration's view on climate change science. So it is and has been absolutely in sync with the what the science is saying.

“What's changed since 2001 is the scientific certainty that this is happening,’’ Hays says. “So back in 2001, the IPCC report said that it was likely that humans were having an impact on the climate. And "likely" has a very specific meaning in IPCC reports. It means that scientists think it's about 66 percent, or two-thirds, likely to be true. In the more recent report, the one that came out in February of this year, the IPCC said that it was very likely that humans were having an impact on the climate. And that, again, has a very specific meaning, meaning 90 percent likely.’’

Now, if you’re looking for a lot of confidence that the government is on top of this problem, read some of the press briefing that Connaughton, Hays and Harlon Watson, senior climate negotiator for the Department of State, have given on the occasion of the IPCC report today:

by William Neikirk
Video by Sabrina Fang

Al Gore is now a Nobel laureate.

But will he be a presidential candidate, too?

Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize today for his efforts in highlighting the global warming issue and put himself back into the presidential picture if he is so inclined.

The announcement was made in Oslo. He shared the award with the International Panel on Climate Change. They were cited for their efforts in warning the world of the dangers of climate change.

The former vice president has dedicated much of his time since his narrow 2000 loss to President Bush to warn the nation—indeed the world—that the planet is headed toward a potentially catastrophic warming.

Nobel Peace Prize Committee Chair Ole Danbolt Mjoes on announcement that former Vice President Al Gore is co-winner of the prestigious award. Photo by Daniel Annum Lauten-AFP/Getty Images.

Barack Obama at the Redemption World Outreach Center in Greenville, S.C., on Sunday. Today. he presents an energy policy. AP photo by Mary Ann Chastain

by Mike Dorning

Presidential candidate Barack Obama hopes to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil and combat global warming with a national auction system that would make every company pay for the right to emit smoke and other sources of carbon.

The "cap-and-trade" auction system is based on the idea that the easiest way to reduce the carbon emissions that contribute to global warming is to simply charge a price for pollution. The approach has long been favored by environmentally minded free-market economists who believe that a pollution "price" would reduce emissions more efficiently than complex government regulations.

Under the Obama plan to be formally announced in a speech today, the government would set a national cap on carbon emissions that by 2050 would be reduced gradually to 80 percent of 1990 carbon emissions. The national cap in turn would determine the number of individual carbon allowances available for auction to industry. So the price of a carbon allowance should reach the level necessary to limit emissions to the right level.

Promoters of the approach believe that such an auction system works better than complicated government standards for industry-by-industry emissions limits and the inevitable grandfather clauses to allow some old factories to continue polluting because it is not economical to retrofit them.

Instead, the market makes decisions about which plants install potentially costly control systems to limit carbon emissions, which ones do not, and which ones simply shut down. Companies make individual decisions on what, if any, controls are economical for individual factories based on the price set for carbon allowances by the national auction.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change at the State Department today. AP Photo by Gerald Herbert.

by Mark Silva

Representatives of the world’s biggest polluters – as well as emerging economies giving Western powers a run for their Global Warming money – are assembled at Foggy Bottom today for the start of what President Bush promises will become an international agreement to set national goals for limits on climate-changing pollutants.

Critics, of course, say this “aspirational’’ attempt to set goals nation by nation falls short of the mandatory global limits that were the goal of the Kyoto Protocols – a treaty which the Bush administration has refused to sign as an unwanted break on the nation’s economy.

But the Bush administration insists that the venture which started at the State Department today will bring important players such as China and India to a table at which all the world’s major industrial nations and emerging powers will set guidelines for a cleaner environment. Bush’s goal is to have that agreement in place by next year.

“We come together today because we agree that climate change is a real problem -- and that human beings are contributing to it,’’ Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said at the opening of the forum today. “The best science tells us exactly this. Now, it is our responsibility as global leaders to forge a new international consensus on how to address climate change.’’

Bush will address the conference tomorrow. As the president proposed at the Group of Eight summit for major industrial nations in Germany earlier this year, this meeting includes representatives from the G-8 and others: The United States, China, the European Union, Russia, Japan, India, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, Italy, South Korea, France, Mexico, Australia, South African, Indonesia and Brazil.

by William Neikirk

Two-thirds of the world's polar bear population could be wiped out by the mid-21st century because of changes of sea-ice conditions, the U.S. Geological Survey projects in a new study.

As a result of the federal agency's study, the polar bear could soon be listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. A final decision on that designation is due in January.

A scientific team investigating the future of polar bears and their habits took six months to analyze the direct relationship between the presence of Arctic sea ice and the health of polar bears, according to the USGS. The bears "depend on sea ice as a platform to hunt for seals, their primary food," according to the agency.

Vice President Cheney quail hunting in 2002. AP Photo/David Bohrer, White House

by Frank James

I'm not among those who see the invisible hand of Vice President Cheney behind everything that happens at the White House.

But I have to admit, as soon as I learned about this executive order President Bush recently signed, ordering federal agencies to enhance hunting opportunities on federally managed lands, my suspicions did run in the direction of one of our nation's most famous hunters.

Here part of the executive order:

Section 1. Purpose. The purpose of this order is to direct Federal agencies that have programs and activities that have a measurable effect on public land management, outdoor recreation, and wildlife management, including the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, to facilitate the expansion and enhancement of hunting opportunities and the management of game species and their habitat.

Sec. 2. Federal Activities. Federal agencies shall, consistent with agency missions:

(a) Evaluate the effect of agency actions on trends in hunting participation and, where appropriate to address declining trends, implement actions that expand and enhance hunting opportunities for the public;

(b) Consider the economic and recreational values of hunting in agency actions, as appropriate;

by William Neikirk

Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) has a plan for combating global warming. He would slap a 50-cent per gallon tax on gasoline, end the mortgage tax deduction for so-called "McMansions," and tax and put a cap on carbon dioxide emissions.

Proposals by a single congressman are usually not so noteworthy, but Dingell happens to be the powerful chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and accustomed to getting his way in Congress.

But the question is whether the House Democratic Leadership will go this far. He and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are often at odds on energy policy. But when Congress comes back this fall, legislation to combat climate change will be considered by the House.

He outlined his ideas in a town hall meeting in Ann Arbor Tuesday, according to a story in today's Detroit Free Press.

by David Lightman

The fight to ease global warming gained an important new ally today as Republican Sen. John Warner agreed to help lead the effort to enact sweeping legislation aimed at substantially reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Warner appeared at a news conference with Sen. Joseph Lieberman, chairman of a key environmental subcommittee, to declare how throughout his career, "I have focused above all on issues of national security, and I see the problem of global climate change as fitting squarely within that focus."

Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats, declared: "We hope it (this new bill) will be a turning point to stop the warming of our planet."

by Frank James

Former Vice President Al Gore stayed on message during an interview this morning with Meredith Vieira on the Today Show.

He wanted to talk about global warming and the televised Live Earth concerts this weekend to dramatize the problem that has become his signature issue. And he wasn't going to allow Viera to pull him too deeply onto sexier topics, as defined by journalists.

Like his son's arrest over the July 4 holiday for allegedly speeding and possessing pharmaceuticals, including pain killers and stimulants, without a prescription. Or the Democratic presidential field.

When Vieira started off the interview by asking Gore about his son Al Gore 3's situation, all he would say was:

Well, we're dealing with it as a private family matter, Meredith. And we love him very much, and we're glad that he's safe and that he's getting treatment. And we're going to leave it as a private matter.

That was it. Gore is scheduled to be on the Larry King show on CNN this evening and it will be interesting to see if he goes any further in talking about his son than he did with Vieira, especially under King's withering interviewing style. (Yes, that's sarcasm.)

He probably won't though since, not only is it a private family matter but it's a criminal legal matter and most good defense lawyer would likely urge the Gore family at this point to say little to nothing.

Posted by Mark Silva

ROSTOCK, Germany – President Bush appears to be getting precisely what he wanted from the G-8 summit on the question of climate change: A commitment of the G-8 nations and several others to work together on developing a global standard for reduction of greenhouse gases by 2009 – which an official communiqué from the summit of world leaders here will call "the Heiligendamm Process.''

It falls far short of the hard standards for pollution control that German Chancellor Angela Merkel sought in the three-day summit underway in nearby Heiligendamm.

The communiqué commits the G-8 nations – the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Japan and Canada – as well as four others, China, India, Brazil and South Africa – to international discussions on improving energy efficiency and cooperation in technology with an aim of reducing C02 emissions – a believed contributor to global warming.

"There needs to be a long-term global goal to substantially reduce emissions,'' said Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, calling it "a consensus document'' that charts "a way forward.'' The document will acknlowedge the "different… aspirational goals'' of several nations. "The commitment is to the development of a longterm global goal.''

Posted by Mark Silva

ROSTOCK, Germany – Don't look for any hard specifics in the 15-page agreement on climate change and environmental issues coming out of the Group of Eight summit this week.

Angela Merkel, German chancellor and host of the G-8 summit at a seaside resort on the Baltic Sea, hoped to forge a hard agreement on combating global warming among the leaders of the eight major industrial nations: Holding any increase in global temperature to 2 degrees Centigrade, increasing energy efficiency 20 percent by 2020 and halving emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.

But President Bush, unalterably opposed to a "one-size fits-all'' agreement this week, refuses to accept hard numbers in Heiligendamm.. Instead, he is calling on the G-8 and several other greenhouse gas-emitters, such as China and India, to join in a discussion down the road with hopes of achieving a "global goal'' for reduction of greenhouse gases by the end of next year.

Despite all the focus placed on this conflict between the hard-charging summit host and a long-reluctant player in the global warming debate, the White House insists the debate behind the scenes is bloodless.

"I do not anticipate any letting of blood in this conversation,'' said Jim Connaughton, chairman of the president's Council on Environmental Quality. "The fixation with one proposal on one target has fascinated me,'' he said to repeated questions about why the U.S. won't accede to specifics."I would encourage you to move beyond your fixation with one target and one particular goal,'' he told a German asking why the U.S. can't agree with a German leader who has befriended Bush. "In America we have the expression -- losing the forest for one tree.''

The document that will come out of this summit "reflects a remarkable consensus,'' the White House's point man on the environment said in Rostock this morning. "This is a bundle.''

The Kempinski Grand Hotel, on the Baltic Sea at Heiligendamm, where the leaders of the G-8 are staying for a three-day summit. This and other photos by Mark Silva

Posted by Mark Silva at 9:06 am CDT

Actor Fred Thompson may have gotten a few laughs a few months back when he went on the radio with his "Plutonic Warming,'' wondering if shrinkage of an ice cap on Mars might have something to do with the planet's inhabitation by "alien "SUV-driving industrialists who run their air-conditioning at 60 degrees and refuse to recycle.''

But, now that Thompson, star of TV and film and former senator from Tennessee, has opened an exploratory bid for a campaign for the Republican Party's presidential nomination in 2008, he might have to start taking global warming a little more seriously. Even President Bush has taken notice of the issue, calling for an international conference of the leading industrial nations to set "a global goal'' for reduction of greenhouse gases – though, given the order in which Bush addressed this issue in his weekly radio address today, one may wonder how seriously the president takes the issue as well.

Thompson, after all, runs the risk of adding himself to that lineup of Republican candidates who raised their hands on stage when asked during the party's first presidential debate who doesn't believe in evolution. Thompson's light-hearted essay on the Paul Harvey Radio Show on the ABC Radio Network back in March raised the question of the earth's location in the Solar System. (Hear it here.)

"Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever,'' Thompson said on the show. "Now scientists are telling us that Mars is experiencing its own planetary warming: Martian warming. It seems scientists have noticed recently that quite a few planets in our solar system seem to be heating up a bit, including Pluto. NASA says the Martian South Pole's ice cap has been shrinking for three summers in a row. Maybe Mars got its fever from earth. If so, I guess Jupiter's caught the same cold, because it's warming up too, like Pluto.

"This has led some people, not necessarily scientists, to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, non-signatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists who run their air-conditioning at 60 degrees and refuse to recycle. Silly, I know, but I wonder what all those planets, dwarf planets and moons in our SOLAR system have in common. Hmmmm. SOLAR system. Hmmmm. Solar? I wonder. Nah, I guess we shouldn't even be talking about this. The science is absolutely decided. There's a consensus. Ask Galileo.''

Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted Thompson's comment on global warming at a forum this week: "That's kind of where that particular wing of the Republican Party is,'' he said.

Reminded that Sen. John McCain of Arizona is among the leaders of legislation in the Senate to cap greenhouse gas emissions, Kupchan said: "It's moving… I think it will happen, and it will happen in 2009. If you just look at the political landscape, we're getting there. It's just not going to happen under this president.''

Posted by William Neikirk at 1:15 p.m. CDT

The story from the White House at first appeared to be dramatic. President Bush announced that he has changed his position on climate change. He called on industrial nations to set a "goal" of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by the end of 2008 (or the virtual end of his presidency).

On closer examination, it's hard to see the real change in his policy. He's already announced plans (unlikely to be enacted in his presidency) to use renewable fuels and conservation measures that he says will reduce greenhouse gases way out there in the future.

Posted by John McCormick at 2:15 pm CDT

DETROIT - Speaking in the heart of America's automotive industry, Sen. Barack Obama today called for tougher fuel-economy standards and more tax breaks for hybrid cars as part of a detailed energy proposal he unveiled before about 2,000 people.

The Illinois senator said his proposals would eventually cut the nation's oil consumption by 2.5 million barrels a day and take the equivalent of 50 million cars worth of pollution out of the air. He would achieve those goals in part by targeting a 4 percent annual increase – approximately one mile per gallon -- in fuel standards.

The Democratic presidential candidate said the nation's "oil addiction" is a threat to national security because it is helping fund terrorism.

"For the sake of our security, our economy, our jobs and our planet, the age of oil must end in our time," Obama told a sold-out Detroit Economic Club luncheon that included some of the Motor City's top business and political leaders.

Posted by John McCormick at 11:30 am CDT.

Speaking in the heart of America's automotive industry, Sen. Barack Obama on Monday called for tougher fuel-economy standards and more tax breaks for hybrid cars as part of a detailed energy proposal he unveiled before about 2,000 people here.

The Illinois senator said his proposals would cut the nation's oil consumption by 2.5 million barrels a day and take the equivalent of 50 million cars worth of pollution out of the air. He would achieve that goal in part by targeting a 4 percent annual increase in fuel economy standards.

The Democratic presidential candidate said the nation's "oil addiction" is a threat to national security because it is helping fund terrorism.

Posted by Mark Silva at 11:40 am CDT

The president’s father, old “41,’’ dropped in at the White House the other day as President Bush, the 43rd president, was playing host to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Jose Barroso, president of the European Commission, at a summit for U.S. and European Union leaders at which a very urgent question of climate change was on the plate.

There was little note of the little family reunion, or for that matter the question of any agreement on addressing the problem of climate change, in the context of the far more pressing debate over the war in Iraq and the war spending bill that Bush was about to veto. But John Bruton, the E.U. ambassador to the U.S., took note of the president’s father, a visitor, in a little note that he has circulated this week which turns out to be complimentary about the evolving U.S. stance on climate change.

“The atmosphere in the summit was remarkably friendly, humorous and relaxed,’’ said Bruton, who ought to appreciate the relative measures of the terms friendly and relaxed in the field of diplomacy as a former prime minister of Ireland. “The leaders lunched together in the White House dining room under the watchful eyes of portraits of former Presidents Madison, Monroe, John Adams and Tyler. And, as they emerged from lunch, they met another former President, George Bush senior, who happened to be visiting the White House.’’

Posted by William Neikirk at 6:15 a.m. CDT

Today is Earth Day. It is the 38th such day in our history. And never has the planet been under such threat, or so many scientists tell us. A United Nations scientific panel says that there is a 90 percent chance the earth is warming, with possible catastrophic effects later in this century.

Just as a dormant plant springs to life in spring, our politicians have awakened to these warnings. Just a few years ago, they treated global warming as one of those theoretical issues hardly worth attention.

And the public was swimming in ennui about the issue. Four years ago, the Gallup Poll called global warming "a bit of a yawn" to most Americans. Half the population worried about it to some extent, the other half didn't.

Now, global warming is heating up as an issue. News about melting glaciers and ice caps and endangered polar bears have had a huge impact on our psyche. The UN studies are unsettling, even if some question the data.

Posted by Mark Silva at 6:30 am CDT

If the government of the United States showed half the interest in gaining control over global warming that European nations are showing, relations between the U.S. and Europe could be a lot less frosty than they are these days.

But, heading into an annual summit between the U.S. and the European Union which President Bush will host in Washington on April 30, E.U. leaders are not too optimistic about the U.S. confronting some of the central issues of climate change – including the caps on emissions of greenhouse gases which the EU has embraced but the Bush administration has rejected as bad for business.

“You’ll find pretty strong differences on climate change,’’ John Bruton, E.U. ambassador to the U.S., says of the upcoming summit. If this sounds like diplomatic cover for a deep-seated complaint, the ambassador lifted the lid for several reporters who joined him over lunch at the ambassador’s residence: “We’re really not happy that either side is facing up to the gravity of the situation here.''

Posted by Mike Dorning at 3:40 pm CDT.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama announced a proposal on Friday to combat global warming by encouraging more use of ethanol in automobile fuel.

The Illinois senator's plan echoes an iniative of California Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger issued an executive order this year requiring fuels sold in California to contain less carbon in order to cut emissions of carbon dioxide, which has been linked to climate change. The California governor set a goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the state's passenger vehicles by 10 percent by 2020.

Obama essentially would impose the California plan on the nation, requiring that fuels sold in the U.S contain 5 percent less carbon by 2015 and a 10 percent less by 2020.

Posted by Mark Silva at 6:30 am CDT

While relatively few Americans consider themselves as "active'' in the environmental movement, an overwhelming majority say they are sympathetic to its goals – and that support has grown in recent years.

"Overall public concern for environmental quality has gradually increased since the onset of the post-9/11 era,'' notes Riley Dunlap, scholar for the environment at the Gallup Organization, whose newest annual survey on the environment shows growing sympathy for the environmental movement in recent years – returning to a level of support seen seven years ago.

"The recent attention given to global warming, stimulated by Al Gore's participation in the film "An Inconvenient Truth" and recent reports from the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, may be raising the salience of environmental issues more generally,'' Dunlap notes.

Certainly, the Toyota motor company has taken note – and that public sentiment for environmental quality could help explain the back-orders of hybrid-powered automobiles and rising share of this nation's auto market, while General Motors and Ford are losing money. Seventy percent of those surveyed say they have purchased products because they are seen as being good for the environment.

Posted by William Neikirk at 2:55 p.m. CDT

WASHINGTON--A senator accused of flip-flopping and a former House speaker accused of inappropriately flapping his mouth debated global warming Tuesday in the historic Senate Caucus Room.

It was packed with people--and with anticipation that one or the other might commit some verbal faux pas. But on this score, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and former speaker Newt Gingrich disappointed. If anything, the longer they talked, the more they seemed to warm up to each other.

Posted by Frank James at 1:16 pm CDT

Now that another international group of scientists has concluded that humans have contributed significantly to global warming, and that millions of people around the world will be threatened by drought or more intense storms, has the Bush Administration changed its mind about not signing onto the Kyoto Protocol, the most comprehensive international pact intended to control greenhouse gases?

Apparently not.

A reporter at an early morning teleconference asked Jim Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, if the report of the International Panel on Climate Change had changed the administration's view about the protocol which President Bush announced early in his first term the U.S. wouldn't sign because of fears it could hurt the U.S. economy.

REPORTER: May I just have one more follow up, please. So is the administration still going to sit out of the Kyoto process?

CHAIRMAN CONNAUGHTON: I think that would be a gross sort of mischaracterization of the U.S. role internationally. We are leading the way with, actually, dozens of advanced technology partnerships. And in the context of our commitment under the U.N. framework convention on climate change, we are actually engaging the developing countries as well in strategies for significantly reducing greenhouse gases.

Posted by Frank James at 12:08 pm CDT

Two men who love the limelight but have mostly fallen from it as other political stars have risen will have a chance for some attention next week as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will take on Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, next week as the men will hold a two-hour debate on climate change on Capitol Hill.

Kerry is in the midst of promoting the book he authored with his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry, "This Moment on Earth: Today's New Environmentalists and Their Vision for the Future." For his part, Gingrich is trying to gain traction for an expected bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

Since both politicians are able to make the most astounding statements, often unintentionally, and also are at polar ends of the politial spectrum, the debate should be fascinating. I predict it will be so well attended, the room won't be big enough.

Read the press release below:

Posted by William Neikirk at 12:45 p.m. CDT

The lines were long and the cameras were out in the Rayburn House Office Building today as everyone waited for the celebrity to show. Even the press corps had to stand in line to see the incoming star.

Al Gore never would have expected such status for a man who had been rejected by the voters for the presidency in 2000 and who had a reputation as a dull figure with a wooden personality.

But here he was, rehabilitated and even with a second chance at politics (if he chooses to take it) as he swept into town to deliver his message that global warming poses a severe risk to the planet, or as he put it "a true planetary emergency."

Gore on the Hill. Tribune staff photo by Pete Souza

Posted by William Neikirk at 6:10 a.m. CST

Why do many people take such delight in beating up on Al Gore?

The question is hard to answer. All I know is it seems to be a source of enormous enjoyment for many people. Perhaps it has to do something with the former vice president's wonderfully earnest qualities.

Take the story that the Associated Press spread around the country Tuesday. It seems that a conservative group figured out that Gore's Nashville 10,000-square foot mansion used more than 12 times the amount of electricity than the typical household in the city.

Posted by William Neikirk at 2:08 p.m. CST

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) joined four other senators today in introducing a bill that would put a mandatory cap on so-called greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. that contribute to global warming.

The question this year is whether President Bush, after resisting a mandatory system for dealing with global warming, might decide to join such an effort. He's at least acknowledged it's a problem and proposed a longer-range plan. But will he go the extra mile?

Posted by William Neikirk at 4:03 p.m. CST

Twelve states and 13 environmental groups urged the Supreme Court today to force the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate "greenhouse gas" emissions from new vehicles in order to prevent global warming.

The hearing showed how difficult it is to deal with an issue that deeply concerns the scientific community. There is no absolute proof that catastrophic climate change will indeed occur, despite alarming projections contained in a number of studies.

Posted by William Neikirk at 2:20 p.m. CST

A report issued by British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government warned today that global warming will devastate the world economy by 2050 and beyond if world leaders do little or nothing to stop it.

The price for inaction could be a worldwide depression every bit as severe as the Great Depression in the 1930s, said the report, perhaps the grimmest to date on the impact of climate change. And guess who will be advising the British government on how to deal with the problem? Al Gore.

Posted by Mark Silva at 12:27 am CDT

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- OK, I admit it, I've got this thing for sunsets.

Call it sentimental, call it a lament for time passing, call it a yearning for the perfect corny photograph, call it whatever you like, but I like sunsets. And at this sunny moment, all is quiet on Russia's western front.