NYT: Clinton Foundation to Work to Reduce Greenhouse Gases

[DeepModem Mom]

Clinton Foundation to Work to Reduce Greenhouse Gases
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Published: August 2, 2006

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 1 — The Clinton Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has focused on combating AIDS, poverty and childhood obesity, will turn its attention to greenhouse gases, former President Bill Clinton said here Tuesday....

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Mr. Clinton said in an interview on Tuesday that his interest in climate issues arose during his presidency and had grown in recent years as he followed news reports on greenhouse gases, watched with chagrin as the United States rejected the Kyoto Protocol and observed his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, negotiate energy policy with “Republicans who were recalcitrant on the issue.”

Mr. Clinton said he would focus heavily on the climate issue over the next year. “It seems to me that there is now a consensus in the world that climate change is real and that we have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” he said. “What we need now is more information about how to do it quickly, economically, and organize the efforts to do it. It seemed to me that the challenge was quite a bit like the work I’ve done on AIDS.”

For its first act, the foundation, with a $3 million grant from three donors, has formed a partnership with the Large Cities Climate Leadership Group, led by the mayor of London, to work on reducing greenhouse gas emissions in cities, which generate roughly 70 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. “This is probably the only thing that Barbra Streisand and Rupert Murdoch agree on,” Mr. Clinton said, referring to two of the donors. The third is Anson M. Beard Jr., a New York investor.

The purpose of the group, Mr. Clinton said, will be to create a consortium through which cities can buy energy-saving products, similar to the way the foundation lowered the price of AIDS drugs for some nations. The group will also create common measurement tools, allowing cities to establish a base line for greenhouse gas emissions and determine the effectiveness of programs to lower those emissions....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/science/earth/02climate.html

[Gully Foyle]

1. Sorry assed Bill

Fuck the Bill and Al to late to the party show.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/June06/Frank06.htm
"hen came the first of the Clinton administration’s neoliberal wet dreams: NAFTA. After the passage of NAFTA, pollution along the US/Mexico border dramatically increased. And Gore should have known better; NAFTA allowed existing environmental laws in the United States to be undermined. Corporations looking to turn a profit by skating around enviro statutes at home moved down to Mexico where environmental standards and regulatory enforcement were scarce.

These follies were followed by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's destructive deal with the sugar barons of South Florida, which doomed vast acreages of the Everglades. Then Gore and Clinton capitulated to the demands of Western Democrats and yanked from its initial budget proposals a call to reform grazing, mining, and timber practices on federal lands. When Clinton convened a timber summit in Portland, Oregon, in April 1994, the conference was, as one might expect, dominated by logging interests. Predictably, the summit gave way to a plan to restart clear-cutting in the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest for the first time in three years, giving the timber industry its get rich wish. Gore, again, said nothing.

Forests under Clinton and Gore’s watch didn’t fare all that well. The Clinton administration's Salvage Rider, known to radical environmentalists as the "Logging without Laws" rider, was perhaps the most gruesome legislation ever enacted under the pretext of preserving ecosystem health. Like Bush’s “Healthy Forests” plan, Clinton's act was choc full of deception and special interest pandering. "When bill was given to me, I was told that the timber industry was circulating this language among the Northwest Congressional delegation and others to try to get it attached as a rider to the fiscal year Interior Spending Bill," environmental lawyer Kevin Kirchner says. "There is no question that representatives of the timber industry had a role in promoting this rider. That is no secret."

In fact, Mark Rey, a former lobbyist for the timber industry and head of the United States Forest Service under Bush, authored Bush’s forest plan and Clinton's salvage bill while working as an aide for Republican Senator Larry Craig of Idaho. "Like Bush's so-called 'Healthy Forest Initiative,' the Salvage Rider temporarily exempted salvage timber sales on federal forest lands from environmental and wildlife laws, administrative appeals, and judicial review," contends the Wilderness Society."

Read the rest and weep. These people, including Kerry, fucked up on Kyoto and sold us all out for big donor bucks.

[w4rma]

3. Al late to the party? You're kidding right? (nt)

[Gully Foyle]

2. Everyone loves

Bill and Al.
At least their political personas.

[uberblonde]

4. Could I point something out here?

Al Gore was VICE president, not president. We didn't have the imperial vice-presidency back then, his role was largely advisory. Bill Clinton had the final word in the White House, and even he could only do so much, what with Republican control of Congress and ongoing investigations.

Maybe they wanted to balance the budget first and figure Al could move on global warming in his first term. Who knows? I wasn't there, but I do think Al Gore's earned the benefit of the doubt on this issue.

[Gully Foyle]

5. Apologists

Read the article.
I can't understand why anyone wants to apologize for actions that if they happened under Bush would garner SCATHING comments.
Unless they are sychophants.
Again before replying READ the article.
And make sure you undertsand what is being said.
Screw it here is another example
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/June06/Frank06.htm
Other than his alleged environmental convictions, Gore was politically timid when push came to shove in Washington. During Clinton’s campaign for president in 1992 Gore promised a group of supporters that Clinton’s EPA would never approve a hazardous waste incinerator located near an elementary school in Liverpool, Ohio, which was operated by WTI. Only three months into Clinton’s tenure the EPA issued an operating permit for the toxic burner. Gore raised no qualms. Not surprisingly, most of the money behind WTI came from the bulging pockets of Jackson Stephens, who just happened to be one of the Clinton/Gore’s top campaign contributors.

Perhaps Al Gore’s greatest blunder during his years as vice president was his allegiance to the conservative Democratic Leadership Council and their erroneous approach to environmental policy. Gore, like Clinton who quipped that “the invisible hand has a green thumb,” extolled a free-market attitude toward environmental issues. “Since the mid-1980s Gore has argued with increasing stridency that the bracing forces of market capitalism are potent curatives for the ecological entropy now bearing down on the global environment,” writes Jeffrey St. Clair in Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: The Politics of Nature. “He is a passionate disciple of the gospel of efficiency, suffused with an inchoate technopilia.”
.....
And the assault on nature continued with Gore’s blessing.

Around the same time Clinton and Gore, after great pressure from the food industry, signed away the Delaney Clause, which prohibited cancer-causing pesticides and ingredients to be placed in our food products. And after pressure from big corporations like chemical giant DuPont, the Clinton administration, with guidance from Gore’s office, cut numerous deals over the pesticide Methyl Bromide despite its reported effects of contributing to Ozone depletion.

WITH GUIDANCE FROM GORES OFFICE!
How powerless was he?
If he was so powerless under Clinton why should ANYONE vote for him?