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WASHINGTON- Senator Joe Lieberman today called on the United States to re-engage in discussions over an international framework to combat global warming and expressed continuing disappointment over President Bush's failure to propose meaningful action to combat climate change.
"Even in the face of the most recent report by the National Academy of Sciences that confirmed our worst fears about global warming, the President has failed to lead," Lieberman said. "Instead, he proposes more studies. We already have thousands of pages of scientific evidence that confirm our planet is slowly overheating. We need action now or we face some dire consequences in the coming years."
In fact, Lieberman said the President's proposed energy plan may make matters worse, and Kyoto even more critical. According to projections by the Energy Information Administration, an independent agency within the Department of Energy, implementation of the President's energy plan would raise carbon dioxide emission levels by 35 percent over the next 20 years.
"The Kyoto agreement has its flaws, but I believe they are fixable," Lieberman said. "By walking away from the agreement, the Bush Administration has walked away from the only international process by which we would be able to address this very real and growing problem. The result may very well be that the rest of the world carries on without us and in a way that is detrimental to our economic interests, as well as our environmental interests."
Senator Lieberman has long been an advocate of addressing climate change in the U.S. Senate, having attended the international negotiations in Kyoto, and Buenos Aires. Although unable to personally attend the Bonn conference because of the Senate scheduling, a member of his personal staff is in attendance.
In the current Congress, he introduced the Clean Power Act with Senator Jim Jeffords (I-VT) and Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), a measure that would use market-based trading mechanisms to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants to 1990 levels by the year 2007. U.S. power plants account for about 40 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, and 10 percent of global CO2 emissions.
"To tackle this problem, we must be aggressive and we must be creative. We must harness our unparalleled capacity for innovation, and lead the world in doing so. We must use flexible market structures in order to allow that innovation to flourish. And we must set goals and adopt caps on emissions that are necessary to drive that innovation. Above all, we must seek common international ground if we hope to protect our people and country from the worst effects of global warming. We must rejoin the world community and the Kyoto process," Lieberman said.
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