On September 29, 2000, in an energy policy speech in Lansing, Michigan, then-Governor Bush proposed a major departure from the voluntary emissions-reductions policies first embraced by his father’s administration almost a decade earlier. He proposed amending the Clean Air Act to require mandatory carbon dioxide emissions reductions from the nation’s utilities as part of a comprehensive program that would reduce emissions of other principal air pollutants as well. While the initiative may have been largely intended to protect him in the televised presidential debates from criticism of his poor record on cleaning up air pollution by Texas utilities, the inclusion of carbon emissions set the stage for a high-profile controversy over global warming that persisted through the first nine months of his administration.

Bush had been in office only a matter of weeks when Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Christine Todd Whitman’s restatement of Bush’s commitment to reduce carbon dioxide emissions touched off a storm of criticism from conservative Republicans. By mid-March, the White House could only calm the storm by releasing a letter from the president to a prominent congressional foe of carbon emissions reductions renouncing his campaign pledge. Soon afterwards, word leaked to the Washington Post of a private lunch held by European ambassadors in Washington at which the guest of honor, US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, remarked that the Kyoto Protocol was “dead, as far as the President is concerned.” The Post also reported that the Bush White House had sought US State Department advice on procedures for reversing Clinton’s 1996 decision to sign the Protocol. At a subsequent press appearance, Bush reaffirmed the position taken by his national security adviser, ill-advisedly using the word “dead” himself to describe the Kyoto Protocol.

In a breathtakingly short time, these clumsily executed moves reversed years of assiduous and successful Clinton administration work to keep climate change out of the political spotlight. Instead, global warming was forced to the front of the president’s international and domestic agenda by the heavy criticism generated by the administration’s actions. For the European Union, US rejection of the Kyoto agreement was the first symptom of a new and highly objectionable “unilateralist” approach to foreign policy. This feeling was followed by similar Bush administration decisions to reject international agreements on biological weapons and trade in small arms, and by threats to exercise the six-month notice provision of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to abrogate the agreement.

On the domestic front, the about-face on power plant carbon dioxide emissions and the controversy over the Protocol became prominent symbols of the administration’s highly unpopular environmental policies. They were likened in the media to decisions to re-examine Clinton administration standards on arsenic in drinking water, changes to policies limiting logging in national forests, and a host of other such actions. Throughout the spring and summer, global warming was the subject of literally hundreds of newspaper articles, editorials, columns, and radio and television news stories—far more attention than the issue had received since 1997. More than 40 major newspapers editorialized in favor of action to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions, many taking such a position for the first time.

Equally importantly, the Bush administration’s mishandling of the issue energized congressional Democrats. For four years, few had been willing to actively support the Kyoto Protocol or to advocate aggressive domestic action to reduce emissions, largely due to opposition from labor. But the highly critical media coverage of the administration’s rejection of the agreement and the reversal of the president’s campaign pledge emboldened many to take far more outspoken positions. For example, House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt, whose home state, Missouri, is second only to Michigan in automobile union membership, publicly called for ratification of the Protocol. Other Democrats lined up behind legislation to reduce power plant carbon dioxide emissions.

The administration’s posture also galvanized support for international and domestic action on climate change among Republicans. Moderates from northeastern states, where the environment is a top-tier political issue, distanced themselves from the president. Then-Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Bob Smith (R-NH) made it clear that he supported a carbon dioxide emissions-reduction program for power plants and designated the legislation as a top priority for his panel. US Senator John McCain (R-AZ), Bush’s 2000 primary opponent, joined with Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT), the 2000 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, in calling for an economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions-reduction program.

On June 7, 2001, one of the Bush White House’s principal efforts to justify reversal of the president’s campaign pledge on power plants and rejection of the Kyoto Protocol backfired spectacularly. For the past decade, public-relations campaigns sponsored by the oil, coal, utility, and automobile industries have attempted to portray the scientific evidence of climate change as uncertain, touting the opinions of a handful of industry-funded scientists who dissent from a very broad international scientific consensus.

This year, the newly released assessment reports by the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), involving over 2,000 scientists in the United States and abroad, demonstrated with further scientific certainty that human contributions to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are accelerating global warming. Having little personal background in the field, senior White House staff members accepted arguments by industry and conservative groups that the IPCC reports did not reflect the views of mainstream US scientists. In May 2001, John M. Bridgeland, deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy, and Gary Edson, deputy assistant for international economic affairs, requested a “fast-track” review of climate change science from the National Academy of Sciences, questioning the IPCC studies. Only days before Bush’s first meeting with European heads of government in Goteborg, Sweden, where the Kyoto Protocol would rise as a principal issue, an 11-member Academy panel released its report. It was an authoritative rebuff to earlier administration statements questioning the IPCC’s assessments: the panel reaffirmed the mainstream scientific conclusion that “greenhouse gases are accumulating in earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise.” The scientists also warned that “national policy decisions made now and in the longer-term future will influence the extent of any damage suffered by vulnerable human populations and ecosystems later in the century.” Ironically, Academy panels had taken this position in earlier reports, of which both the Bush White House and many reporters were unaware. The White House-initiated review, so clearly an embarrassment to the administration, generated headlines and editorials all over the country. Even the most prominent congressional skeptics were forced to admit that science had reached a stage where action was required. US Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NB), the leading Senate opponent of the Protocol, told the New York Times, “This report does provide us with enough evidence to move forward in a responsible, reasonable way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”