At one point during his speech on climate change, President Bush looked up from his prepared remarks, furrowed his brow, and stared directly out at his audience and the cameras.
"We are doing a lot to protect this environment," he declared. Throughout the entire speech Bush seemed put upon, but the extra emphasis only underlined his stance of annoyance, as if anyone who could not see how much his administration had done to protect the earth was being inexcusably rude.
How you interpret his speech depends a good deal on how much credence you are willing to give his assertion. If you believe that Bush's environmental record is the worst of any modern president, that his administration has worked consistently to both weaken and block enforcement of environmental protection laws, that his Environmental Protection Agency has been a hideous joke, and that protecting the interests of the energy industry has been his first priority, well then, you are not likely to take very seriously his newfound allegiance to the cause of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, you might be more inclined to think that his new initiative is nothing more than a feeble, lame-duck attempt to get Congress moving on minimally effective greenhouse gas emission limits, so as to forestall the chance that the next Congress and president will introduce legislation with teeth.
Bush's lame-duck climate change proposal
