US experts and environmental activists on Tuesday slammed US President George W. Bush for threatening to veto a far-reaching climate change bill that is before the Senate for debate.
“We have had seven years of President Bush trying to mislead the country about the science of global warming and the urgency of taking action,” Dan Lashof, climate center director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told a news conference.
“Now he’s trying to mislead the country about the economics of taking action,” Lashof told reporters listening in to the tele-conference, called to mark the publication of a report on how building a green economy in the US would create jobs.
Bush warned on Monday that the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill, which calls for a “cap and trade” system to try to cut emissions in the US, “would impose roughly US$6 trillion of new costs on the American economy,” and threatened to veto it.
“Nay-sayers for taking action now on solving global warming keep pointing to solutions as being a cost to the economy. Nothing could be further from the truth,” Bracken Hendricks, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress think tank, told the news conference.
“It’s critical that all of us question the assumption that global warming is a cost when in fact it represents the future of the US economy,” Hendricks said.
The “cap and trade” system suggested in the climate change bill proposes that companies trade permits, giving them the right to emit a certain amount of pollution, “capped” below current emission levels.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on Monday that the climate change bill would have “a devastating impact on the US economy ... and result in massive job losses.”
But the report released on Tuesday pointed in the opposite direction.
“Millions of US workers will benefit from the project of defeating global warming and transforming the United States into a green economy,” it said.
The report highlights a “chance to revitalize this economy with green energy growth,” one of its authors, Bob Pollin, said.
Ignoring the economic opportunities inherent in building a green economy has cost the US its competitive edge and leadership role in developing technology, Hendricks said.
“We’ve seen solar manufacturing and markets taken up by Japan and Germany ... because the United States, which invented solar photovoltaic technology, has had a complete abdication of leadership in building this as a strategic industry,” Hendricks said.
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I