Full speed backward.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Whenever it appears that the Bush administration's environmental record can't get worse, it invariably rises to the occasion.

President Bush and his appointees have rolled back protections for this nation's air, water, land and wildlife, siding with corporate interests eager to make a quick buck. But nowhere has the White House been more obstinately regressive than on the issue of global warming.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush pledged to seek hard limits on emissions of carbon dioxide, the primary contributor to the warming of the earth's atmosphere. When he became president, he promptly rejected the Kyoto pact on climate change, which has been approved by more than 170 nations and mandates reductions of greenhouse gases.

Earlier this week, the administration made what initially appeared to be a stunning turnaround. The Environmental Protection Agency released a report acknowledging that human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, are causing climate change and that they will wreak havoc on the environment, increasing global temperatures by as much as 9 degrees this century.

And what exactly does the Bush administration propose doing to avert a crisis that the report says will cause global drought, destroy forests, melt mountain snowpacks, flood coastal communities, and speed the spread of water- and rodent-borne diseases?

Nothing. Well, not exactly nothing - but nothing more stringent than the program of voluntary emissions targets Bush announced earlier this year. The EPA report recommends allowing emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping pollutants to increase by 14 percent over the next decade - the identical rate they increased over the past 10 years.

Still, it was tempting to take solace in the administration's willingness to acknowledge what has become a consensus of opinion in the scientific community. At a time in when many carbon dioxide-emitting politicians still insist global warming is naturally caused and beneficial to farmers, the Bush report offered at least an acceptance of the cause and scope of the problem.

Then on Tuesday, one day after his own administration issued the climate change report, the president showed his true brown colors and dismissed the report's findings. ``I read the report put out by the bureaucracy,'' he said with heavy sarcasm.

The president also repeated his opposition to the Kyoto treaty. Ironically - or perhaps very much to the point - Bush reiterated his position on the same day that Japan ratified the international accord and urged the United States to join efforts to fight global warming by requiring reductions of heat-trapping gases.

In the absence of White House leadership on global warming, several states have started taking actions on their own. Both New Hampshire and Massachusetts have approved bills aimed at reducing power plant emissions of carbon dioxide, and New York may soon follow suit. In the U.S. Senate, a comprehensive air pollution bill is being drafted, although it faces a dim future in the hands of of a Republican-controlled House.

Such an incremental approach is far from ideal. The scope of the global warming problem requires a cohesive national strategy, one that is unlikely to emerge from an administration intent on compiling an abysmal environmental record.