National Wildlife Federation welcomes President Bush’s shift on global warming, which was announced by the White House this afternoon in anticipation of the President’s State of the Union remarks tonight.

As the global warming issue heats up across America, the President's position on global warming is beginning to thaw.

The White House today for the first time said it would work to halt the growth of U.S. global warming pollution from oil, which stands in stark contrast to the president’s five-year old policy of allowing pollution levels to increase indefinitely. While the shift is a step in the right direction, the President’s policy proposals do not measure up to the urgency of the global warming threat to the future of America’s security, wildlife and economy.

The president has dipped a few oars in the water, but he has not fully turned the ship to the right destination. We need to be cutting global warming pollution from gasoline and all other energy sources, and we need to start now with a mandatory program that guarantees results. We need to set goals to cut emissions from all sources, including automobiles, by 20 percent over the next decade. The president’s plan is neither comprehensive nor adequate.

The White House announced today that the president tonight will proclaim ‘the goal of reducing U.S. gasoline usage by 20 percent in the next ten years.’ According to the White House announcement, ‘The president's plan will help confront climate change by stopping the projected growth of carbon dioxide emissions from cars, light trucks, and SUVs within 10 years.’ America’s dependency on oil currently accounts for about 40 percent of U.S. emissions or carbon dioxide, the pollutant most responsible for global warming. The Department of Energy recently projected that carbon dioxide emissions from oil will grow by 11 percent over the next 10 years and by 29 percent by the year 2030 without action.

The new energy goals cast a puzzling shadow on the Bush Administration’s tactics just last week. President Bush opposed the just-passed House bill to shift billions of dollars of oil subsidies to alternative energy sources. We hope that the overwhelming bipartisan support for that bill, which passed 264 to 163, was a wakeup call for the president. A key question for the president now is whether he will reverse his position as that bill moves through the Senate.

The new White House plan calls once again for opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling, which will sacrifice one of America’s great unspoiled areas. President Bush isn’t listening to the millions of Americans who understand we cannot meet our energy needs by forever spoiling our wild places. Moving to new clean energy alternatives is the only long-term solution to the problem.

We look forward to working on a bipartisan basis in the new Congress to advance effective global warming policies, and to work with the Bush Administration where we have common ground. Recent polls demonstrate that the vast majority of Americans believe global warming is a serious threat and they want our government to act. Leaders in Congress have already announced their intention to move much more aggressively on global warming with binding measures to broadly curb global warming pollution, and the National Wildlife Federation will be assisting those efforts as our top priority.

Look forward with me to the summer of 2040 when the Arctic Ocean could be completely ice-free according to a recent study published by a team of scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the University of Washington, and McGill University. 

Because the Arctic is floating sea-ice riding on a warming ocean and blanketing millions of square miles of ocean, it is one of the most sensitive ecological regions on the planet to global warming pollution. The NCAR scientists analyzed the growing impact of greenhouse gas pollution on the Arctic by running various scenarios on supercomputers designed to model the earth’s climate at various pollution levels.

Their study reveals that “the extent of sea ice each September could be reduced so abruptly that, within about 20 years, it may begin retreating four times faster than at any time in the observed record.”  The scientists warn that “sea ice is likely to accelerate so rapidly that the Arctic Ocean could become nearly devoid of ice during summertime as early as 2040.”

Profound changes in the Arctic ice in addition to dooming the polar bears will also surely play a more crucial role in de-regulating planetary climate as its energy-reflecting surface rapidly decreases and is replaced by a vast expanse of energy-absorbing open Arctic sea.  In addition to its reflective properties, the expanse of sea ice insulates the relatively warm Arctic Ocean from the cold air and alters the exchange of heat, moisture and salinity. 

Damage to vast ecosystems on a global scale is far outpacing our reparations.  As the Arctic melts, frozen organic matter in the tundra throughout the circumpolar region thaws more deeply with each passing year.  A study entitled: “Methane Emissions and Biogeochemistry of North Siberian Thermokarst Lakes” by Katey Walter University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks warns that the tundra is now giving off its own carbon dioxide and methane at rates five times what scientists had earlier predicted.

It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this finding as nature has the capacity to emit enough methane and carbon dioxide to dwarf annual human emissions and actually double the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere.  For more than a decade, the world's leading scientists have issued an urgent warning that as many as 1/3 of the living organisms on the planet may become extinct if current destructive trends continue.

Obviously, we can not let this dangerous trend continue.  With your help NWF can continue to be a leader in changing the forecast for the future of wildlife.

Last week I stated that U.S. Fish & Wildlife did the right thing by officially declaring that the polar bear deserves protection as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

This is another powerful wake up call. Are we listening?

Even though they still number about 22,000 to 25,000, the polar bear is in grave danger because their ice habitat, once the size of the continental United States, is shrinking fast. The current rate of sea ice decline – it is shrinking by over 23,000 square miles per year or nearly nine percent per decade according to estimates provided by the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the loss of sea ice is already threatening to destroy fragile Arctic ecosystems vitally important to polar bear habitat.

Assessing the impact of habitat loss on polar bears, another recent study by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center discovered a "very dramatic" change in cub survival and estimated that as few as 43 percent of the polar bear cubs in Alaska’ Beaufort Sea are surviving their first year as a result of shrinking ice habitat. Cub survival is down from about 65 percent survival measured in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A loss of habitat equates to a loss of food supply. The bears are losing body mass and having difficulties sustaining cubs.

The fate of the Arctic is not just the fate of the polar bears, it will be the fate of our children's world.

Think of the Arctic as a giant mirror the size of the continental U.S. keeping the planet cool by reflecting most of the sun's energy back into space . Now think about the complete disappearance of that reflector in as short as 30 years. Replace it with an energy absorbing ocean and watch the profound and dangerous climatic and ecological changes to the planet.

The reason why the Feds were forced to act is that the Arctic habitat, once the size of the US, is rapidly melting and will be completely gone during the summer minimums in about 34 years. The Nation Center for Atmospheric Research and the UCAR's projections for summer minimums of ice are deeply disturbing. You can see their projection and the animation at:

                              http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2006/arctic.shtml

Because of the way the administration played the polar bear listing, media coverage of the announcement left the door open to natural variability. That's nonsense!

Humans have put about a trillion tons of CO2 in the biosphere half of which is still in the sky.  That's a 36% increase! Yet, some still question our climatic impact?

We have a moral responsibility to move beyond denial and apathy to confront and solve this problem to protect wildlife and to protect our children’s future.  Let's work together in 2007 to wake up America to the extreme danger of global warming.