Clinton Bashes Bush's Environmental Policy (Sort of)

Remember the U.S. diss of the Kyoto protocol? Here are some updates on the latest happenings on the environmental policy front as this year's UN Climate conference is wrapping up.

Here's an article from the AP on how Bill Clinton criticized the Bush administration's policy.

Former President Clinton told a global audience of diplomats, environmentalists and others Friday that the Bush administration is "flat wrong" in claiming that reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to fight global warming would damage the U.S. economy.

With a "serious disciplined effort" to develop energy-saving technology, he said, "we could meet and surpass the Kyoto targets in a way that would strengthen and not weaken our economies."

And a somewhat different spin of the same speech from the NY Times - they point out that Clinton also denounces the setting of specific pollution ceilings:

Early in the afternoon, former President Bill Clinton gave a hastily arranged speech to the thousands of delegates in which he sketched a route around the impasse that included gentle rebukes of those seeking concrete targets and also of the Bush administration.

Mr. Clinton said countries should pay less attention to establishing global targets for emissions and more to discrete initiatives to advance and disseminate technologies that could greatly reduce emissions in both rich and poor countries.

In a comment clearly directed at the Bush administration, he noted that the United States had adopted a precautionary approach to fighting terrorism. "There is no more important place in the world to apply the principle of precaution than the area of climate change," he said, generating waves of applause.

"I think it's crazy for us to play games with our children's future," Mr. Clinton said. "We know what's happening to the climate, we have a highly predictable set of consequences if we continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and we know we have an alternative that will lead us to greater prosperity."

And finally, the U.S. delegation backs down a bit from their dickish behavior. Cause after all, the children are our future right?