Bush goes green

HA! That'll be the day. I think Mark Goldberg is being way too optimistic about this AP report--and I say so knowing full well that he's calling the news "baby steps":

U.S. Undersecretary of State Paula J. Dobriansky said the Indonesian talks were the "kind of discussion that needs to take place to move us forward." Dobriansky could not say if the United States would drop its long-standing opposition to forced emission reductions, but noted that a combination of mandatory measures and financial incentives was part of domestic environmental policy.

A hallmark of the last year's worth of Bush rhetoric on the environment has been the ubiquity of words like "talks" and "negotiations" that will put us in a "strong position" to "move forward". It always sounds like baby steps. But if you parse the words closely enough, it reveals itself to be total gibberish. The point, of course, is to buy time so that George Bush can hand this problem off to somebody else at the end of his term, at the direct cost of several billions of additional tons of carbon puffed into the atmosphere in the intervening 450 days or so.