A Cynical Energy Plan.

• Position: Federal government plan calls for oil exploration

Two years after the warmest decade on record, three years after the warmest year on record, while the ice cap on top of Mount Kilimanjaro melts and glaciers around the world recede, we have just what we need to accelerate global warming even further: a manufactured energy crisis and an Administration dedicated to putting its grimy hands on every drop of fossil fuel it can find.

During his first months in office, George W. Bush has managed to send U.S. energy policy--already seriously behind the times--into the Dark Ages. First, he reneged on his promise to cut emissions of carbon dioxide. Then he opted out of the Kyoto Accord, the 1997 international treaty designed to cut production of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. The United States is the world's largest producer of carbon dioxide, a central greenhouse gas, according to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

When he explained his decision, Bush said that scientific knowledge of global warming was "incomplete"--an old tobacco company dodge.

A February 2001 report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that carbon dioxide makes up 64 percent of global warming gases. Most of the controllable carbon dioxide emissions come from the coal, oil, and gas industries. The panel warned that, if global warming was not brought to a stop, it could lead to more and more serious droughts, storms, and floods, cause the spread of disease, and result in more hunger, displaced populations, and strife.

"When you put two oil men in the White House, I guess this is what you have to expect," said Bill Hare, head of climate policy for Greenpeace, who called Bush's global warming views "Neanderthal."

In a recent op-ed for the Progressive Media Project, Joshua Karliner, executive director of CorpWatch, says that G. W. Bush stands for Global Warming Bush.

Bush's next move was the budget, which sharply curtails money for research into renewable energy and efficiency. It also ties solar energy research directly to the receipts from oil drilling in the Arctic. ("It's like funding drug rehab by funding heroin and crack," says Kert Davies, Global Warming Campaign Coordinator for Greenpeace.)

Then the oil man who became President sent his fellow oil man, Vice President Dick Cheney, out to admonish the American people that there is a national energy crisis afoot, bound to get big and ugly, like the one in California.

But his solution was enough to make any environmentalist gasp. "Vice President Dick Cheney said today that oil, coal, and natural gas would remain the United States's primary energy resources for `years down the road' and that the Bush Administration's energy strategy would aim mainly to increase supply of fossil fuels rather than limit demand,"...