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China released it's first national strategy on Climate Change, choosing to focus on improving energy efficiency but rejecting mandatory caps on greenhouse emissions:

The 62-page plan, two years in the making, served at least partly as a rebuff to separate efforts by President Bush and European nations to draw China and other developing countries into a commitment to reduce emissions. But China has resisted mandatory reductions in emissions, arguing that it is still a developing country and needs to balance environmental improvements with maintaining economic growth.

With China set to overtake the U.S. this year as the leader in emitting greenhouse gases, we now have the two biggest polluters committed to no real commitment. Without mandatory caps, the human race is doomed. It's that simple. The global community is thirsting for leadership from the U.S. in this most pressing issue of the 21st century, but will unfortunately have to wait another 18 months until a new president takes over the White House.

"China is not going to act in any sort of mandatory-control way until the United States does first," said Joseph Kruger, policy director for the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan group in Washington.

Along with India and other large developing countries, China has long maintained that the established industrial powers need to act first because they built their wealth largely by burning fossil fuels and adding to the atmosphere’s blanket of greenhouse gases.

Just one of George Bush's legacies will be his failure to act on global warming between 2000-2008. Just another lost opportunity among many...

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