The memo singles out as a major strategic failure the incoming Bush administration's response to Bill Clinton's last-minute executive order reducing the permitted level of arsenic in drinking water from 50 parts per billion to 10 parts per billion. Mr Luntz urges Republicans to "emphasise the importance of 'acting only with all the facts in hand'", in line with the White House position that mandatory restrictions on emissions, as required by the Kyoto protocol, should not be countenanced until further research is undertaken. "Rather than focusing on the things we don't know, it's almost as if parts of the plan were written by people who are totally unfamiliar with where ecosystems science is coming from," panel member William Schlesinger told the Guardian. Last week, a panel of experts appointed at the Bush administration's request to analyse the president's climate change strategy found that it lacked "vision, executable goals, clear timetables and criteria for measuring progress". The phrase "global warming" appeared frequently in President Bush's speeches in 2001, but decreased to almost nothing during 2002, when the memo was produced.Įnvironmentalists have accused the party and oil companies of helping to promulgate the view that serious doubt remains about the effects of global warming. The popular image is that they are "in the pockets of corporate fat cats who rub their hands together and chuckle manically as they plot to pollute America for fun and profit", Mr Luntz adds. The environment, the memo says, "is probably the single issue on which Republicans in general - and President Bush in particular - are most vulnerable".Ī Republican source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said party strategists agreed with Mr Luntz's conclusion that "many Americans believe Republicans do not care about the environment". Words such as "common sense" should be used, with pro-business arguments avoided wherever possible. The phrase "global warming" should be abandoned in favour of "climate change", Mr Luntz says, and the party should describe its policies as "conservationist" instead of "environmentalist", because "most people" think environmentalists are "extremists" who indulge in "some pretty bizarre behaviour. "Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate." Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. "Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science," Mr Luntz writes in the memo, obtained by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based campaigning organisation. "The scientific debate is closing but not yet closed.
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