President Bush doesn't seem to be in a hurry to accomplish anything.

I'll leave the subject of Iraq to another genre of bloggers–y'all know what I'm talking about here.

On June 11, 2001, in a Rose Garden speech, our President said:

I've just met with senior members of my administration who are working to develop an effective and science-based approach to addressing the important issues of global climate change…

By increasing conservation and energy efficiency and aggressively using these clean energy technologies, we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by significant amounts in the coming years.  We can make great progress in reducing emissions, and we will…

Our administration will be creative.  We're committed to protecting our environment and improving our economy, to acting at home and working in concert with the world.  This is an administration that will make commitments we can keep, and keep the commitments that we make…

Fast forward to another sunny day in the Rose Garden–almost six years later. Last Monday, Bush announced that he had instructed the E.P.A., and the Departments of Transportation, Energy and Agriculture to explore regulatory options to achieve "20 in 10"  (reducing the projected growth of oil consumption within 10 years to a level 20 percent lower than current forecast, a goal the President mentioned in his 2007 State of the Union address). Oh yeah, he said he expected the process to be complete by the end of 2008–another 18 months from now.

Response to Bush's speech has been tepid, at best. Speaking to the New York Times, David Doniger, policy director for the climate center of the Natural Resources Defense Council said:

This really amounts to saying, "Trust us, we’re doing something." It’s a clever effort, maybe a half-clever effort, to slip out of a corner. We haven’t been promised any specific reduction in global warming pollution, or any specific increase in the efficiency in cars.

Doniger also pointed out the fact that:

the president’s directive seemed to limit the E.P.A.’s flexibility by requiring that it act with sister agencies, meaning, “they can only walk as fast as the slowest one of them.”

Representative Edward J. Markey, the chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, called the announcement “a stall tactic.”

Goals are great in soccer and hockey, but when it comes to cutting our oil dependence and addressing global warming, it can’t be fun and games anymore for this administration. In effect, the president asked his agency heads to share ideas and come up with a plan that is due three weeks before he leaves office. Our oil dependence is too high, and the threat of global warming is too great, to allow half-measures and delay to take the place of action any longer.

The office of California Attorney General Jerry Brown offered this point of view:

While Mr. Bush was in the Rose Garden today stating his desire to “cut America’s gasoline usage by 20 percent,” his own lawyers were in a San Francisco federal court defending his administration’s scandalously inadequate fuel efficiency standard for SUVs, pickups and minivans.

Brown applauded the president’s favorable comments on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and cutting back on gas-guzzling, but urged the President to take two immediate steps: 1) tell the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to grant California and 12 other states permission to reduce vehicle greenhouse gas emissions and 2) junk last year’s token 1-mile-per gallon increase in fuel efficiency standards and “propose something real.”

Brown added:

The president doesn’t offer a single concrete proposal on how to combat global warming and instead directs his bureaucracy "to work together" to come up with a plan."

Let's face the facts here folks: does anyone really think the Bush bureaucracy is at all interested or capable of coming up with a timely plan to combat global warming? I don't.

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