The Daily Background
| AP: Pelosi WILL create special House committee on global warming
by Arlen Parsa
With the last item on the 100 Hours agenda related to global warming and big oil corporations, Speaker Pelosi has apparently decided to create a special new House Committee aimed at combatting global warming. Writes the AP in a pretty crappy article mostly focused on how Pelosi is shaking things up and how much she hates her fellow Democrats and how Democratic unity will fall apart because of it (pft):
She’s moving to create a special committee to recommend legislation for cutting greenhouse gases, most likely to be chaired by Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., a Democratic leadership aide said Wednesday.
Markey has advocated raising mileage standards for cars, trucks and SUVs and is one of the House’s biggest critics of oil companies and U.S. automakers, [sic]
The AP says that “A new committee would give Pelosi a vehicle to push a regulatory scheme for reducing greenhouse gases and pit her against President Bush, who plans to outline his global warming approach in his State of the Union next week.”
I’ve heard conflicting things about what President Bush will say in his SOTU, one of them that he would address global warming and make a “turn-around,” but the White House has apparently strongly denied this- and we’ve heard such rumors that he would make a “turn-around” before and they never came to fruition.
Mr .Bush [sic] has repeatedly opposed any mandatory reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, instead advocating voluntary approaches and research on new technologies. Pelosi has supported mandatory reductions with specific target dates for achieving them.
They say President Bush has opposed mandatory caps on CO2 emissions during the 2000 elections, although they don’t note that he was in favor of them back when he was running against Al Gore in the 2000 election.
