Bush to set goals on emissions

WASHINGTON — President Bush plans to outline today the way he thinks the United States can stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions and issue a challenge to lawmakers on climate change legislation.

In a speech, Bush will lay out a strategy rather than a specific proposal for “long-term” and “realistic” goals for curbing emissions, White House press secretary Dana Perino said Tuesday. She did not disclose details of his announcement and would not say whether the president would propose any kind of mandatory cap on greenhouse gases.

Bush wants every major economy, including fast-growing nations such as China and India, to establish a national goal for cutting the emissions believed responsible for global warming. In his remarks, Perino said, Bush will “articulate a realistic, intermediate goal” for the United States. Bush will emphasize the importance of offering incentives to promote technology as an effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, she said.

The speech will precede a meeting Thursday and Friday in Paris, the third in a series of talks that Bush organized last year.

A new global warming pact is being crafted to succeed the first phase of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. It requires 37 industrialized nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States is the only industrialized nation not to have ratified Kyoto, but it agreed with nearly 200 other nations at a conference in Bali in December to negotiate a new agreement by the end of 2009.

The Environmental Protection Agency has been told by the Supreme Court that carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas, is a pollutant and must be regulated if the EPA determines it is a danger to health and welfare.

Also, the Interior Department is under pressure to give polar bears protection under the Endangered Species Act because of disappearing Arctic sea ice. A lawsuit has been filed under the same law for more protection for Arctic seals.