False Claims

Here's Harlan Watson, the Bush administration's man in Montreal for the climate conference, not only reiterating the White House's opposition to the negotiations but also making extraordinary claims regarding U.S. progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions:

"Look at the data - the United States has done better in the first three years of the Bush Administration in addressing greenhouse gas emissions than the EU ... the UK, France, Germany."

For the record, Reuters reports:

United Nations data shows the US is doing worse than all the nations named by Watson in the longer term. US emissions were 13.3 per cent above 1990 levels in 2003 - the EU average was a fall of 1.4 per cent.

Watson's position is no surprise. As Pulitzer Prize-winning** reporter Ross Gelbspan writes in his book, Boiling Point, when Watson first came on board in 2002, he promptly announced that the White House "wanted no part" of the current review of greenhouse gas reductions underway in Montreal. "The next time we take stock on climate change," Watson said at the time, "has been set by the president at 2012." In other words, no action for 10 years.

**Update 4/18/07: Turns out this itself is a false claim. Although Gelbspan conceived and edited a 1984 Boston Globe series that did indeed win a Pulitzer, he himself was not named as a recipient.