Climate change: Will the real George W. Bush please identify himself?

As President, George W. Bush has been strongly opposed to any treaty-based international mandates regarding greenhouse gas emissions. Condi Rice reiterated this point during the opening presentation she made at the Washington meeting on climate change today, where she said, ” Let me stress that this is not a one-size-fits-all effort. Every country will make its own decisions, reflecting its own needs and its own interests, its own sources of energy and its own domestic politics.”
Bush and other administration officials have also frequently stressed that technological innovation will provide the answer– with the strong implication that only an unregulated, mandate-free approach will allow that to happen.
But reel back the time-clock to 1999, and there was Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, enthusiastically signing into law important legislation on “Renewable Portfolio Standards”– legislation that mandated the state’s energy retailers to bring on-line a firmly established amount of renewable energy each year (with the responsibility to do this divided in a proportional way among them.)
If you read p.44 of this (PDF) recent study from Greenpeace International and the European Renewable Energy Council you can read more details about how the Texas RPS legislation worked. The report notes that it worked very well– establishing the regulatory/incentives context in which Texas rapidly went on to become a real national-level leader in the development and use of windpower:

This year the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) believes as much as 2,000 MW of new wind power could be installed in Texas, potentially a full two-thirds of wind development in the United States.This would bring the total wind power in Texas to over 5,000 MW effectively reaching the state RPS goal set for 2015 only two years ago…
The common view of the success of the wind industry in Texas is that the RPS jumpstarted the market, but now wind competes well on the open market with fossil fuels. Also, the industry development has continued in part because of the creation of a proactive planning process to drive investment in necessary power line upgrades and extensions.

Who knew? I mean, who knew that when he was governor, Bush had helped usher in such farsighted and effective goal-mandating legislation?
Because the point is, that the regulatory/incentive structure established by government is essential to provide the context in which technological innovation will flourish.
It seems Bush forgot that, somewhere on the way from Austin, Texas, to the White House?
It is also interesting that GWB has not been the only Republican governor who acted sensibly and with foresight on climate-related issues. There is also, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger over there in California, trying to do a number of fairly farsighted things. (Though I would note, nothing yet as bold as would have been required of the US as a whole if it had been a party to the Kyoto Protocol.) But anyway, there’s Arnie, trying to do some two-thirds-good stuff over there in California– and according to this piece in Tuesday’s WaPo, President GWB’s officials have been actively working behind the scenes to try to block him!
Here’s what Juliet Eilperin wrote there:

The Bush administration has conducted a concerted, behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign to try to generate opposition to California’s request to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks, according to documents obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
California, along with 11 other states, is hoping to enact rules that would cut global warming pollution from new motor vehicles by nearly 30 percent by 2016. To do so, California needs a waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency, a request that has been pending for nearly two years. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) has threatened to sue if EPA does not rule on the waiver by Oct. 22.
A flurry of e-mails among Transportation Department (DOT) officials and between its staffers and the White House, released yesterday, highlights efforts that administration officials have made to stir up public opposition to the waiver…

So Bush’s position on this is notably not simply a “states’ rights” position…
I guess on Friday morning, he is due to address this group of governmental reps at the Washington meeting on climate change that Condi opened today. Frankly, given his appalling record on the climate issue as president, it boggles my mind that at this point he seems to be trying to position himself as in some sense a “pro-green” president.
It was the height of chutzpah, at the APEC meetings last month, when he and Australian PM John Howard– the two leaders of significant nations who had notably stayed outside the Kyoto process– were both trying to position themselves as enthusiastic front-runners in the green movement.
I don’t think anybody was really taken in. In today’s WaPo, Gordon Brown’s special rep for limate change, John Ashton, was quoted as saying that self-imposed targets are not enough. “We need to make commitments to each other, not just to ourselves.”
And still on the climate-change issue, here’s a little chart I made– using official US government data– of the different rates of CO2 emissions per-head in various parts of the world. You will see that the US’s level is more than twice as high as that of Europe and Japan– which have equally “advanced” but much more carbon-efficient economies. You can read that in conjunction with this post I put up on JWN on the human-equality aspects of the climate issue a couple of weeks ago.
And finally, we certainly need to pay attention to this public-opinion poll report from the BBC and Globescan/PIPA, which shows that strong majorities in all 21 of the countries where polling was done agree that human activity has been a significant cause of climate change, though the proportions judging that it is “Necessary to take major steps very soon” to deal with the problem is less robust in a number– but not all– of the countries.
Significantly, in the US, 59% of respondents agreed with this latter statement– as did 70% of Chinese respondents.