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Video: White House's Connaughton Clarifies Bush Administration's New Climate Change Approach

Business Wire, Oct 11, 2007

WASHINGTON -- James Connaughton, Chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, today clarified the Administration's new climate change strategy at a press conference hosted by Energy Policy TV (http://www.energypolicytv.com/) and the United States Energy Association. The video is available at no cost on Energy Policy TV: Bush's New Approach to Climate Change (http://video.energypolicytv.com/displaypage.php?vkey=5a96a7da4d1105d 584dd&from_search=1) (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser's address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.)

Connaughton said the new approach will allow each country to create its own Greenhouse Gas reduction goals. They will then become mandatory and managed by the UN, as is today's Kyoto Protocol. He said the new approach is not a parallel process, or separate from, current or future UN GHG-reduction regimes, but that it will allow countries to engage the issues on a realistic basis and produce better results. He termed it a "bottom-up" approach, noting that the "top-down" Kyoto process has not succeeded in engaging each nations' bureaucracies and therefore has not achieved the buy-in envisioned by the framers of the Kyoto Protocol.

Connaughton said the Administration will put new emphasis on three areas: coal, transportation and deforestation. He said that these issues have huge potential impact, yet so far have received only five percent of the world's discussion on GHG emissions reductions.

Connaughton said an important measure of the new approach's success will be to watch the UN's December meeting in Bali to see if more than just climate ministers become engaged in the climate change process. He said energy ministers, finance ministers and other senior government officials from every nation will have to become actively engaged for climate change to move forward in a faster, more meaningful way.

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