A Major Policy Change?

British media reports that "Downing Street says that belated US recognition of global warming could lead to a post-Kyoto agreement on curbing emissions".

George Bush is preparing to make a historic shift in his position on global warming when he makes his State of the Union speech later this month.

Bush and Blair held private talks on climate change before Christmas, and there is a feeling that the US President will now agree a cap on emissions in the US, meaning that, for the first time, American industry and consumers would be expected to start conserving energy and curbing pollution.

'We could now be seeing the beginning of a consensus on a post-Kyoto framework,' said a source close to the prime minister. 'President Bush is beginning to talk about more radical measures.'

This would be a remarkable and welcome development.

Evidence that the President should make this policy shift:

Global Warming: Melting Tibetan Glaciers Threaten China, Other Countries’ Economies: The tens of thousands of glaciers on high Tibetan plateau and Qinghai province store vast quantities of water, feeding the life-giving rivers to cities as far away as Bangladesh and Vietnam as they melt each summer... But this is not happening any more! The winter snow is failing to make up for summer melting. And, as a result, a large layer of ice “as big as central Beijing” is lost each year! The present fear lies with the fact that global warming is speeding up the loss, according to the Chinese geological survey.

Immense ice shelf breaks off in Canadian Arctic: "This loss is the biggest in 25 years, but it continues the loss that occurred within the last century," [Geographer Luke] Copland told AFP, saying 90 percent of the the ice cover had been lost since the area was discovered in 1906.

Numbers of rockhopper penguins have plummeted in recent years, possibly due to climate change, a bird charity said in a warning over the creatures made into stars by the recent blockbuster "Happy Feet." Their number in the Falkland Islands has tumbled 30 percent in just five years, from 298,496 pairs in 2000 to 210,418 in 2005/06, said the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

I hope the President makes this important shift in his thinking and his policies.

Republicans were once the vanguard of environmental protections. That was the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt.

They could be again.

GP