Obama Turns More Cautious on Climate Change,

[G_j]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/us/politics/11climate.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Obama, Who Vowed Rapid Action on Climate Change, Turns More Cautious

By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: April 10, 2009

WASHINGTON — President Obama came to office promising swift and comprehensive action to combat global climate change, and the topic remains a surefire applause line in his speeches here and abroad.

Yet the administration has taken a cautious and rather passive role on the issue, proclaiming broad goals while remaining aloof from details of climate legislation now in Congress.

The president’s budget initially included roughly $650 billion in revenue over 10 years from a cap-and-trade emissions plan that he wants adopted. But the administration, while insisting that its health care initiative be protected, did not fight to keep cap-and-trade in the budget resolutions that Congress passed last week, and it wound up in neither the House’s version nor the Senate’s.

Overseas, American officials are telling their counterparts that they need time to gauge the American public’s appetite for an ambitious carbon reduction scheme before leading any international effort.

Has the administration scaled back its global-warming goals, at least for this year, or is it engaged in sophisticated misdirection?

Maybe some of both. While addressing climate change appears to be slipping down the president’s list of priorities for the year, he is holding in reserve a powerful club to regulate carbon dioxide emissions through executive authority.



..more..

[Pirate Smile]

1. They can focus on Health Care or Climate Change - Health Care won.

[elleng]

2. Future Grows More Hazy For Mountaintop Mining.

EPA's Fluctuating Messages Concern W.Va. Residents.

'As Washington has become more focused on climate change, coal has become something like the new tobacco: publicly reviled, at least by some, but still deeply embedded in the economy. Coal produces dirty water when it is mined and greenhouse gases when it is burned, but it also accounts for about half of U.S. electric power, and coal mining provides about 82,000 jobs.'

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/10/AR2009041003414.html?hpid=moreheadlines

[HillbillyBob]

3. Then why did we elect him?

first retreads from previous crooked admins now is he gonna wuss out on this most important objective too?

[natrat]

4. the planet will burn up, but the banks got paid trillions,sems a good tradeoff

[villager]

5. So "change we can believe in" means change to a climate not hospitable

...to carbon-based life? :shrug:

[HillbillyBob]

6. Then why did we elect him?

first retreads from previous crooked admins now is he gonna wuss out on this most important objective too?
Cap and Trade is bullshit too. Nothing short of all of us tightening up our homes and our gluttonous greed for energy will avert serious fuel shortages and even worse climate problems..
OH and Fuck the deniers, they are just fucking deluded.
I have lived in 4 different states for periods of time long enough to see the changes for my own damn self.
Yes We have made large changes, and it was not that painful either, in fact we are saving $ and are more comfortable in our home and we are not sitting in the dark.

[OhioBlue]

7. I don't think he wasn't gonna get this one.

My Dem Congressman and my Dem (very liberal) Senator both said that they were NOT going to agree to the current cap and trade proposals. They said that it put Ohio at a disadvantage.

I'm not educated enough on the subject to know if they (my reps) were right that this proposal put Ohio and other traditional manufacturing States at more of a disadvantage than other States, but that did seem to be their impression.

I don't think that removing the cap and trade from the budget means that he isn't serious about Global Warming tho - there are monies in the stimulus bill for alternative energy and efficiency programs.

[RufusTFirefly]

8. Clean Coal = Healthy Cigarettes

That's what radical Leftist Al Gore said

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4-jpOq3ytU

[G_j]

9. political logic...

and war equals peace