Global Warming Challenge.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Comment - Viewpoint essay

George Bush has committed so many criminal and derelict acts it's hard to figure out which ones are the worst of all. There's the Iraq War. There's the illegal spying on Americans. There's torture. There's kidnapping (I refuse to call it "extraordinary rendition"). There's the corruption of the Justice Department not only in its hirings but in its prosecutions. There's the outing of Valerie Plame, and the coverup. There's Katrina. And many more: Just glance at Dennis Kucinich's thirty-five articles of impeachment and you can get a sense of the magnitude of malfeasance.

But one issue may ultimately loom larger than all of these. And that's Bush's abysmal performance on global warming.

From beginning to end, his aggressive anti-intellectualism, his rich-kid arrogance, and his corporate allegiance have brought us the most backward and destructive policies imaginable--all at a time when foresight, not foolishness, was called for.

Let's review the tape.

He first denied the existence of global warming, and the human and corporate contributions to it.

Then he pulled us out of Kyoto.

Then his political appointees censored the scientists and edited, like some crazed Lysenko, the real science out of the policy papers.

He did nothing for six years about raising auto emissions standards, and then only reluctantly agreed to a change in the law that will raise fuel efficiency to 35 miles per gallon--by the year 2020!

He paid only lip service to solar and wind and other clean energies.

He did the same for conservation, which Cheney derided as a mere lifestyle choice. Bush and Cheney have just assumed that high demand was a given--and to put the blame on China and India if anyone complained.

For fiscal 2009, Bush proposed a 27 percent cut for energy efficiency programs and renewables.

Then, this spring, when Democrats tried to get a bill on global warming finally through the Congress, the Bush Administration prevailed on Republican legislators to put the kibosh to it.

While Bush and Cheney fiddled, the planet's been burning.

In July, two huge chunks of ice broke off the Canadian Arctic shelf. Scientists are predicting that the Arctic Ocean will be totally ice free during the summer of 2013.

Unusually powerful hurricanes, like Katrina and Rita, have kicked up, just as scientists predicted. So, too, did they predict the increasing number of tornadoes, the record heavy rains, the intense droughts, and the more frequent wildfires that we've been seeing.

It's...