NEWS: Environmentalists are suing George Bush for refusing to produce a climate-change report they say is required by law.
The US government is required to produce a national assessment on global warming every four years under a law passed in 1990.
But the last such report was published at the end of President Bill Clinton’s rule in 2000.
The polically sensitive assessment was released with little publicity, reports the The Arizona State, and warned that without efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, temperatures in the western US could rise by 8 to 11 degrees by the 2090s.
The Center for Biological Diversity, in Arizona, along with Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, have brought the legal action.
The White House says it is not working on another national assessment. It says organisation it set up in 2002, the US Climate Change Science Program, has begun producing 21 reports which satisfy the spirit of the law.
Kent Laborde, of the US Climate Change Science Program, said: “It’s more important to have good, solid, credible science that is the basis of public policy, rather than something that is done for the sake of expediency.”
But Kassie Siegel, of the Center for Biological Diversity, said: “What the law requires is a national assessment, something usable and accessible. A bunch of reports doesn’t really help this.”
Picture: White House photo of George Bush by Eric Draper
