The president's "new" climate strategy turns out to be utterly vacuous. Stunning, I know. Instead of setting hard targets for emissions reductions, the United States will convene a bunch of meetings from now until 2009, and everyone will sit around and talk about voluntary goals.
Steven Hayward thinks the White House is "in effect threatening to put the UN's IPCC out of business as the main diplomatic forum for global climate policy." That may be the idea here, but either way, it's clear that neither Congress nor other G-8 leaders are going to convince Bush to take global warming seriously, and the only actual leadership on the issue for the next two years is going to come from state governors and legislatures.
--Bradford Plumer