U.S. EPA says it won’t regulate CO2 emissions from autos

( ENN ) - The Bush administration denied a petition on Thursday by three environmental groups to declare carbon dioxide spewed by automobiles as a pollutant, saying it has no authority over emissions linked to global warming.

We all know that it occurs naturally….. but cars and trucks are not a natural part of the environment are they? In the article quoted below it is noted that the “CO2 ruling would be no big surprise, given previous Bush’s policies. In March 2001, he went back on a campaign promise to impose limits on carbon dioxide from power plants. He had declared in a campaign speech that CO2 was a pollutant.”

( Planet Ark ) - The United States, with about four percent of the world population, is the leading polluter and emits about 23 percent of the world’s CO2.

People love their cars and the automobile industry plays a big part in the U.S. economy so it is in the best economic interests of the U.S. to do little to discourage their use.

( ENN ) - The head of the EU’s European Environment Agency challenged the United States on Tuesday to publish environmental data so people could compare the green credentials of the world’s two biggest trading blocs.

The challenge being that “products should be labeled to show consumers if they were built in a country where energy efficiency was taken seriously or not” and “identify whether the product was built in a country that respects the 1997 Kyoto agreement on reducing greenhouse gases” the deal rejected by Bush earlier this year.

Absolutely!! Let the consumer make the choice. We were also unaware that gasoline costs half as much in the U.S. (and Canada would have to be lumped in as well because prices are not that much different than those south of the border) as in Europe. I would imagine that were gasoline prices taxed to the extent they are in Europe there would be a heck of a lot more people on the bus with me than there are right now.

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