News Flash! Bush Not Entirely Wrong on Climate Crisis!

The Bush administration is taking a new tack in its approach to global heating at the G8 Summit in Scotland, which past experience suggests may be cynical and mendacious, but on the merits it is almost not untrue. Fancy that.

Starting with the positive, G.W. Bush allowed these very words to escape from his oil-based lips: "I recognize that the surface of the Earth is warmer, and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem."

Strike up the band! What's next? Bush discovers gravity?

Okay, let's not get carried away.

The exact proposals Bush will make, and the exact wording of the final communique out of Scotland, are yet to occur. But Bush is urging movement away from fossil fuels, which must be regarded as positive, and suggests a package of financial incentives to encourage alternative energy.In this, he is partly being just realistic about what businesses are already doing, and perhaps offering them more government welfare to do what they know they have to do anyway. But that's not unprecedented, and the truth is that the attempts to deal with the two main elements of the climate crisis are going to be messy and fractious.

The two elements are near-term crises and long-term prevention. At the moment, proposals for alternative energy have all kinds of near-term benefits, except that they are unlikely to assuage the near-term effects of the climate crisis. When those effects start to be pronounced in various parts of the world, there may be a reaction against alternative energy because it didn't prevent them. That's a problem leaders should be aware of and talking about, but in fact political leaders are dealing in baby steps. For now, it's at least something that they are talking about moving away from fossil fuels at all.

There are a number of prominent examples of the unorganized and often entreprenurial efforts, which "Dreaming Up Daily" will highlight in coming weeks. For now, this one: the prominence of wind power.

In this International Herald Tribune article, a number of nations and international companies are getting into the wind power business in a big way. Though most conspicuous in Europe, they include companies in Japan, and General Electric in the US:

General Electric said on June 28 that its revenue from wind power equipment in 2005, its third year in the wind power sector, would exceed $2 billion, based on orders and commitments through the first six months. "Wind power continues to be the fastest-growing segment of the global energy industry," General Electric said in a statement.

Of course, the growth of this industry belies Bush's contention that the Kyoto accords are destructive and unhelpful, for Kyoto spurred these alternative energy efforts. It ensured some sort of a global standard that gives businesses the confidence to pursue this.

But Bush is right, if only accidentally, that Kyoto is not the complete answer, and it alone is not sufficient to address the climate crisis, in near-term or far.