George Bush has just announced yet another non-binding environmental initiative.
US President George W. Bush said Thursday he would urge major industrialized nations at a summit next week to join a new global framework for fighting climate change after the Kyoto Protocol lapses.
Environmental groups immediately criticized the plan as vague and based on non-binding limits on the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, but Britain and Germany hailed the move as an important, if symbolic, step forward.
“The United States will work with other nations to establish a new framework on greenhouse gas emissions for when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012,” Bush said in a speech laying out his agenda for the June 6-8 G8 summit in Germany.
See, the idea is that we will set long range “goals” that no one is required to meet. Why:
“It’s important to assure that we get results,” said Bush, who made the initiative a key goal of his talks next week with leaders from Europe, where critics have accused Washington of dragging its feet on climate change.
Obviously, requiring anyone to actually do anything meaningful would pervert the free market. No, that sort of government intervention should be restricted to more important issues, like this one:
The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.
The Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. A beef producer in the western state of Kansas, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wants to test all of its cows.
Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone should test its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive tests on their larger herds as well.
You see, if Creekstone tests all its beef, it will advertise that fact to consumers, who might choose to pay premium prices for its beef. That might force its competitors in the mass beef killing industry to follow suit, and that would cut into their profit margins. We can’t have that, so we need to set a binding goal that we test up to 1% of our beef, and no more.
I’m still waiting for the Bush people to do one good thing. It’s simply against the laws of chance that they can go eight years with a perfect record.
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