The Times' Take

2 views on the environment from The New York Times:

Real Action on Climate Change



By Anne-Marie Slaughter
Anne-Marie Slaughter, an international lawyer and the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. She is the author “The Idea that is America,” and she is spending this academic year in Shanghai.

I caught a snippet of a speech at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Bali, long enough to hear the speaker say: “We need real action.” Real action. Not promises, not hopes for new technologies, not high-minded rhetoric, but action.

When I was in Japan last month, I saw real action in action. After a day of meetings at the Foreign Ministry, a young diplomat escorted me to the entrance just after 5:00. We walked through a darkened hallway; I assumed that we were in a part of the building under renovation. Not so – my guide explained to me that all non-essential lights were turned off “to save energy and the environment.” We came to the elevator bank, where 5-6 people were waiting in front of an elevator even though the elevator next to it was there and empty. I gestured toward it, and my guide again explained that after 5:00 only one elevator ran – the others were blocked.

Bush’s Alternative Energy Flip-Flop


The New York Times
The White House has raised several objections to the breakthrough energy bill recently negotiated by House leaders. But there’s an interesting and ironic backstory to one of these complaints.

In a dyspeptic letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Allan Hubbard, the director of the White House national economic council, states that Mr. Bush is particularly unhappy with the bill’s Renewable Electricity Standard — a provision that would require states to produce 15 percent of their energy from renewable sources like wind and solar by 2020. The provision, Mr. Hubbard says, is “overly prescriptive” and would hurt consumers.

What the letter does not say, and what the White House would rather we not remember, is that as governor of Texas, Mr. Bush enthusiastically signed into law a renewable electricity mandate that was part of a broader bill encouraging deregulation and greater competition in the utility industry.

This 1999 mandate was extraordinarily forward-looking for its time (22 states have such mandates now) and the results were immediate.